While standing at the bar waiting for The Sun’s bartender to grab my Corona, I noticed a man with thinning brown hair, medium height and a modest build, smiling at me. I nodded and returned the smile. On the dance floor a few hundred feet away, men’s bodies gyrated to the DJ’s tunes in a haze of smoke. It was January 1993. Having just moved from Oklahoma, this was the first of many cold Salt Lake City nights. Back then all Utah bars were designated private clubs, and one needed a membership or find a sponsor to be admitted. As a newcomer, frequenting the bars was my way of finding community.
The Sun, Utah’s biggest gay dance club, was near some dilapidated buildings at 200 South and 700 West, which means two blocks south and seven blocks west of the Mormon Temple at the centre of Salt Lake City, also the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I’ll call him Steve. We made our way toward one another. The conversation flowed easily, but he seemed a bit tightly wound to be in a bar holding beer. I attributed his stiffness to his job as a police officer for one of Salt Lake’s adjacent municipalities, and to his being a recovering Mormon. They call that a Jack Mormon. Until I got used to it, I thought people, using the phrase LDS, were saying they were on LSD. Religion comes up effortlessly in Utah. Having just relocated from Tulsa, its own kind of Christian Disney Land, where I had inhaled years of anti-gay dogma I couldn’t reconcile with, taking the job at The Salt Lake Tribune was an act of personal liberation from my own religious proclivities. The Salt Lake City newspaper was the only place I landed an interview.
Once Steve heard I was a new education reporter for The Tribune, he relaxed, leaned forward and whispered, “Have I got a story for you.”
A principal at one of the alternative schools had created an anonymous witness program. Students snitched on other student graffiti artists, drug dealers, gun carriers and class cutters in exchange for cash immediately from his wallet. The caught offenders were forced to pay back the money. It seemed shady, making it an excellent story for the paper. Within a few days the principal confirmed it all. “They know I have a $10 or $20 bill for kids if they will give me that kind of information,” the principal told me.
The district had collected an upsurge of fully loaded handguns at that school as a result of his program. Numerous students had been arrested and charged with carrying concealed weapons on school property. In the previous eight months, sixty-one weapons had been confiscated. Street gangs were blossoming in those days, such an affront to the rhetoric of family values. Because in Salt Lake City and Utah, things are never what they seem.
The Tribune carried the story in a prominent spot with my new police officer friend holding a cache of four guns that had been obtained that week. The headline blasted CENTRAL HIGH PRINCIPAL PAYS FOR TIPS ON GANGS, GUNS. The district’s public relations man yelled at me on the phone the following Monday. Because Central was an alternative school, my story was out of context, he said, and it place the entire district in a less than flattering light. He wanted a retraction.
“There’s nothing to retract,” I said, cradling my phone. “Show me what’s inaccurate and we’ll correct it.”
Silence on the other end. While the photo and headline had a sensationalist’s edge it was not inaccurate. The district just didn’t like it. In my way of thinking, journalism was the opposite of public relations, so I had done my job. That principal who had spoken to me was muzzled. My editors were impressed that I had only been in town for a few weeks and had rattled Utah’s biggest school district. They never knew I got the tip at a gay bar.
For a paper owned by liberal Catholics, they wouldn’t have cared. This was the beginning of my adventures as a queer Black journalist in Utah, where identity politics were always a factor even if not spoken. Surprisingly my job covering Utah’s school districts offered me a front-row seat for the ways marginalized communities were treated, especially gays and lesbians.
When I left in 1996, after three years there, I vowed to never return, but like Lot’s wife in Genesis I kept gazing back. It keeps calling me back for research, weddings, the Sundance Film Festival and funerals. When I left Utah for a job elsewhere, I was in the midst of a string of front page stories about how Mormon church culture tried to quash the weekly meeting of a Gay-Straight Alliance.
*****
Encased in the stunning Wasatch Mountain front, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains, Salt Lake City has gorgeous, clean and wide streets. The friendly, mostly white faces, create an atmosphere that seemed hospitable and safe to visitors. Outsiders might find it easy conflating Salt Lake City and Utah. Locals consider anything inside the 110-square-mile city limit to be Salt Lake. The regional identity is a bit more complicated. The Census Bureau says 2.7 million people live in the greater Salt Lake City Metropolitan area (between, Ogden to the north, and Provo, home of Brigham Young University to the south). Utah has 3.4 million residents. Demographers designate portions of Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, all states contiguous to Utah, the Mormon corridor. I prefer Mormon Land, which I appropriated from the name of The Tribune’s podcast.
Salt Lake City’s roots are inextricably linked to the arrival of Mormons in the mid-1800s. It’s impossible to divorce the place from Mormon cultural history and legend. The sensational success of the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, HBO’s series Big Love and that network’s movie version and the previous Broadway productions of Angels in America, keep ideas percolating in the popular imagination about the place as sexually repressed.
A few times in the last decade Salt Lake City has been designated as a queer friendly city. Each time I tell anyone how queer the city is, they lift an eyebrow or tilt their head. Last year The Salt Lake Tribune’s headline asked, “Is Salt Lake City one of the queerest places in America?” In late May, Salt Lake City scored a perfect 100 on The Thrillist’s index for “queer adventures in red states,” and one of the nation’s “Top 10 most surprising Pride destinations,” blasted The Advocate’s magazine. Salt Lake City began popping up on queer destination lists in 2015 when the city unveiled a plan to name a street for Harvey Milk. Salt Lake City got it done in 2016, almost a full decade before San Diego and Portland did. Unlike West Hollywood or San Francisco, its queerness has a qualified ‘q.’
“Salt Lake City is a queer place,” writes historian J. Seth Anderson in LGBT Salt Lake. “In 1847, the Brighamite sect of the [LDS church] imported one of its own queer traditions, the practice of polygamy. Polygamy scandalized many in 19th-century America who found it an affront to morality and decency.” In other words, sexual proclivities they embraced, made them queer or odd to the mainstream religions of the day.
Entering the English language in the 16th century, queer originally meant “strange,” “odd,” “peculiar,” or “eccentric.” It might refer to something suspicious or “not quite right,” or to a person with mild derangement or who exhibits socially inappropriate behaviour. On their own website in recent years, the LDS Church has celebrated itself for its peculiar people. In the same sense as the early Judeo-Christian tradition, as recorded in the Old and New Testaments or 1 Peter 2:9 “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people.” The Mormons queer Utah in this way.
However, the Mormon Church’s public stance against same-gender love and the collective LGBTQ response to the church locked both parties into mutually parasitic dance. The secrecy and closet made going to the thriving bar scene, the queer rodeos, volleyball team, the imperial court for the drag queens, all the more delicious. Participating in queer life felt like a criminal enterprise. Utah’s anti-sodomy law was invalidated in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas, and only repealed by the state legislature in 2019.
A vortex is described as a whirling or circular motion that tends to form a cavity or vacuum, a perfect physical description of the Salt Lake Valley and a metaphor for Mormonism’s sociological impact. Merriam-Webster says cartography is the art and science of graphically representing a geographical area and it may involve the superimposition of political, cultural, or other non-geographical divisions onto the representation. That’s it, a vacuum that superimposes political and cultural forces pulling the strings on people’s lives.
*****
Because Mormon Land is always at least twenty years behind the rest of the nation, The Sun, Bricks, The Deer Hunter and Trapp, gay bars felt circa 1970s, especially with the excessive cigarette smoke back in the 1990s. The Radio City Music Lounge, said to be the oldest bar west of the Mississippi, opened in 1948 before evolving into a mostly gay hangout in the 1950s and 1960s, felt trapped in that era. While I liked the atmosphere of gay bars, I was still detoxing from my own self-loathing Protestant indoctrination that equated being spiritual with sequestering the gay self.
While flipping through the back pages of SLC’s alt-weekly The Private Eye I noticed ads for all kinds of escorts and gay dating services. My eyes were drawn to Manline, an interactive service that recorded personal voice ads in various categories and age groups. For a certain fee per minute, you’d call, listen to others’ recorded voice ads, send and receive voice messages in your mailbox. I could hear desperate gay men talk explicitly about deep sexual cravings. If you liked a message or voice, you could leave a message in response, in the hope they’d respond, too. Our loneliness and geography were being monetized. That was how I first heard Russ Lane’s slightly nasal, high-pitched but friendly voice, setting it apart from the others. I left a message. After a series of exchanges, we talked on the phone and arranged a rendezvous.
I walked into Smith’s supermarket in The Avenues, a funky neighbourhood and found an envelope stuffed behind a designated stack of advertisements. Inside the white envelope was a picture wrapped in unmarked paper. It felt like a scene from a spy thriller. Out fell a picture of a smiling tall, lean redhead with a moustache and sporting a 1970s-style open shirt collar. The clandestine, verboten nature of it I found exciting. I relished doing what people said I shouldn’t. The exchange sizzled with an erotic energy I found liberating. I responded by leaving a picture of myself in an envelope in the same spot.
Later, we spoke on the phone and arranged to have dinner at the restaurant in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, formerly known as Hotel Utah.
By the time I arrived, Russ Lane was already seated at a table. Lankier, thinner and paler than I expected, Russ had an exceedingly polite demeanour. He knew all about the famed Hotel Utah, where every U.S. president from Taft to Reagan stayed the night until it closed in 1987. It had just been recently reopened under the LDS Church’s management and newly renovated, just in time for two gay men dressed in their Sunday best, to have a date.
Over the next ninety minutes, we had a free-ranging conversation about our religious backgrounds. The zeal that had me move to Tulsa right after college to attend Bible school with no job prospect was akin to feeling called to do a Mormon mission. Neither of our faiths could overcome our truest nature – being gay men. Neither of us had alcohol.
After his mission, Russ told me he moved to San Jose as he came to terms with his sexuality. In 1986 the lanky redhead hopped on a bus with little money and no job, intent on helping revitalize Salt Lake Affirmation, an LGBTQ support group for people from a Mormon background. By 1988, he had been elected director of the national organization. When we met, he had completely abandoned Mormonism and was a Sunday School teacher at First Baptist of Salt Lake City, a gay-affirming congregation.
In short, we had both moved to Utah to liberate ourselves from oppressive religious backgrounds.
I shared that when I was a freshman in college, I had converted to a form of Buddhism that dictated I chant every day. That comment opened the door for him to speak about his interest in Eastern mysticism and metaphysics. He told me about The Autobiography of a Yogi, the memoirs of Paramahansa Yogananda, a famed Indian guru and founder of the Self Realization Fellowship in the United States who rose to prominence in the early 20th century. He asked if I had read You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise L. Hay, a New Age teacher who said gay men could heal the pain that tormented them by saying affirmations. Hay’s work popularized looking in the mirror and saying, “I love you,” which had been mocked by Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley character. The teacher who stuck with me from that date was Florence Scovel Schinn, whose books, The Game of Life and How to Play It and Your Word is Your Wand, mixed so-called New Age teachings with Scriptures and began reframing the Bible for me. Russ proved himself to be a spiritual alchemist, specifically a gay mystic. A mystic is someone who claims a direct connection with the divine separate from organized religion. Through meditation and being a vegetarian, he’d landed on a transcendent spirituality that removed the violence and toxins that often shut gays and lesbians out. By the evening’s end, I was close enough to smell the soap on his skin as we embarked on a relationship that was more than friends than lovers. Over the next three and a half years his warmth and infectious spiritual fervor became a transformative presence. One person can change your life, and this was the beginning, for me, of healing the rift between the sacred and the profane. I met other gay mystics in Utah but none quite like him. He opened me to a vast library of spiritual texts I would return to for decades, making my spirituality queerer. Prior to that, my default was that all gay people were an abomination. Russ showed me a different way to be in the world.
*****
Salt Lake City remains a fountain of fantastical news stories, especially going back to the 1980s when Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, detonated two bombs there. Although no one got hurt in the University of Utah bombing in 1981, the one he planted in 1987 in a computer store’s parking lot seriously injured a man. Other local stories—invariably disturbing or twisted—made national and international headlines, including the 1984 double-homicide conviction of the Lafferty brothers, who slashed the throat of their sister-in-law Brenda and her 15-month-old daughter. Kicked out of the Mormon church, they’d formed The School of the Prophets, a polygamous splinter group not affiliated with the LDS Church. (The Mormon Church ended polygamy in 1890 but splinter groups continue the practice.)
The other big news story was Elizabeth Smart’s 2002 abduction. At fourteen, she was kidnapped by knifepoint by a radical preacher offering his own brand of Mormonism. Her return nine months later when she was discovered in Sandy, Utah on the southern part of the Salt Lake Valley, made national news.
When the editors assigned me to the education beat, I expected I’d be writing boring PTA and Teacher of The Year stories: au contraire. School board members, like most Utah elected officials, are Mormons. Because a vocal liberal minority kept a close eye on them, I was constantly fielding tips from sources about otherworldly developments related to Utah’s schools. Across the street from every public high school in Utah is a building called Seminary, which offers parallel religious education courtesy of the Mormon church to high-school-aged students. It seemed like something from beyond the United States. The lessons were off school property but happened during school hours—students are released from their regular classes to attend these schools to study scripture. Its focus is squarely on Mormonism, but teenagers of all faiths are welcome. No other state has an exact equivalent.
The automatic us-vs-them setup allowed me to generate story after story of the ways marginalized teenagers such as unwed mothers, brown, queer, physically disabled and those with racially mixed backgrounds were treated by the majority culture. A handful of those stories became precedent-setting lawsuits, some even spilling over into the federal courts. In thirteen years of writing for the Tulsa World, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The San Diego Union-Tribune, my three and a half years covering the schools beat for The Salt Lake Tribune was my most thrilling beat.
*****
In the fall of 1993, sixteen-year-old, blonde, a second-string quarterback at Sky View High School in Smithfield, a tiny town of 6,000 some 90 miles north of Salt Lake City, had just finished showering after practice. A teammate had warned him to not put his underwear on because someone had tampered with them. Seconds later ten teammates surrounded him, slammed him to the floor, hogtied his nude body hand and foot with athletic tape to a towel rack three feet from the floor.
“One of the kids came in and started taping up my genitals,” he told me back then in a phone call. “(They were) taping around my legs and then around my neck.” In that moment, he heard a young woman screaming. “I looked up and there was my date to the homecoming. I saw her take off out of the room.” The guys on the football team laughed until he complained. His parents got involved. The school superintendent, although they were well-ranked and one game away from the statewide championship, canceled the football season. The majority of the other kids’ parents blamed him for bringing forward his complaint. In a small Utah town, this was a big deal. Despite being the victim of a hazing that bordered on assault, he was shunned. To assuage the angry parents, the coach suspended him from the team “to protect him.” This became a huge story statewide. Even
People Magazine wrote about it. The situation simmered for years after that. By 2001, the kid was a junior in college when 2001 a jury awarded him $250,000 in a civil court case on the grounds that his freedom of speech was violated.
It’s hard to deny the hazing’s homoerotic subtext.
*****
Living in Utah as a gay Black man forced me to confront layers of my identity like no other place ever has. For one thing, I didn’t realize my hiring at The Salt Lake Tribune was historic. I became the first Black reporter hired in its 122-year existence.
Gay liberation was in the air in the 1990s. RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)” blasted on video screens at The Sun. He even gave an appearance at Bricks, another gay bar that opened down the street. President Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, which allowed gay people to serve in the military, made things worse. I interviewed a closeted military guy who walked through the newsroom in Army fatigues and boots. For whatever reason, I kept physical copies of all of the entire body of reportage from those days at Tribune because the stories seemed electric. Although I was squarely on the schools’ beat, my expanding contacts with queer sources including the Gay and Lesbian Utah Democrats (GLUD) and Utah’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, plied me with volumes of story ideas.
Exiting The Tribune on Main Street to go out and interview people felt like disembarking a liberal spaceship that temporarily landed in a strange new world. Of course, Salt Lake City is in the United States but in my six-foot-four Black body, it was hard to not feel like a brother from another planet. People stared at me constantly but covered it over with a friendliness that seemed inscrutable. While I was thriving as a reporter, learning to write in a narrative style, Utah’s cultural climate made me eager to leave. I wouldn’t have thought of myself as an activist raising a rainbow flag. Queerness permeated my social life in Salt Lake. On Sundays I participated in a gay men’s volleyball league. My gay apartment manager was someone I’d met at Bricks. Another of my good friends, Tim, whom I had met in at the Utah Stonewall Center, vacillated between mysticism and addiction. He took me to a Church of Religious Science which used a book called A Course in Miracles, which espoused an alternative version of Christianity. Eventually Tim’s life, was overtaken by addiction, mostly meth and prescription pills.
Another friend, Jack, was a therapist from Michigan whose partner was a Native American with a severe drinking problem that would later cause them to split. More than once, I got caught in the crossfire of some of their squabbles. My friend Darryl was the only other Black gay man I routinely hung out with. An executive with an expense account, he routinely flew in from New York City to train employees at a nearby call centre. We’d fly to Los Angeles to go to dance clubs. Life in Salt Lake City felt like one great big gay party.
One night after leaving Bricks, I attended a party at a residence on the east bench of the Valley. As I was preparing to leave at 11:30, the host screamed, “Where you going you bitch?”
“What?” I responded in shock. “I’m going home. It’s late.”
“No, you ain’t! You going somewhere to get fucked, ain’t you?”
“No, I’m not.”
I bid the host farewell and went home alone.
Most of the few Black non-Mormon residents seemed to attend Calvary Baptist Church or Faith Temple Pentecostal Church. While Calvary, founded in 1921, was a historic church, I had abandoned the Baptists when I was fourteen and had no desire to return. And Faith Temple is best known for its association with Mary Cosby, formerly of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” who married her grandmother’s second husband after her grandmother died. Because they were Pentecostal, I wasn’t interested. But their umbrella organization operated Southern Plantation, a delicious soul food place where I could get collard greens and fried catfish. Also, I did a story that raised questions about their finances and doctrine, so I stayed away.
*****
In the fall of 1995, just under a year before I left Utah, Kelli Peterson, a 17-year-old senior at East High School, sought permission for a handful of queer students to meet thirty minutes a week in a gay-straight alliance. The GSAs that had been popping up at high schools all over the United States had finally arrived in Mormon Land. Twice beaten up by students for being openly lesbian, Peterson had attempted suicide and was in therapy. Peterson, who’d been experimenting with fire-engine red, purple and burgundy hair colours, was about to ignite a statewide furore.
The request bounced from the principal’s office to the School Board to the State Office of Education. No one knew what to do. In the meantime, Michael Leavitt Jr., then East High School student body president and the son of Utah’s then Governor, spoke out against the GSA. So did his father, which accelerated the story. Such a club would encourage homosexuality, we were warned. But in the winter of 1996, the Utah Attorney General’s office said that under federal law, the school had to grant them permission.
The mostly Mormon Utah State Senate, in response, held a secret meeting, and played anti-gay videos suggesting that some Utah teachers were leading students into a homosexual lifestyle. I asked the attorney for the state board why people were so nervous. “They’re just afraid of orgies. They’re afraid they’re going to open the door and see students engaged in orgies.” That comment, which I printed in the paper, got him muzzled.
The flap made international news. Reporters from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and MTV News all showed up at the board meeting. Then, in a heated two- and-a-half hour meeting, the Salt Lake City School Board banned all noncurricular clubs to prevent the GSA from meeting. Out went the Bible, Frisbee and UFO clubs, along with all of the Latino and Asian student-focused groups.
Students at all three of the high schools rose up in what turned out to be chaotic protests, interrupting traffic and roiling out into the streets. Some protested against the gay-straight club, while others were angry their pet clubs had been tossed out. It was clear that an indeterminate group was just taking advantage of the opportunity to skip school. Barely sleeping well for more than a week, the controversy landed me on the front page for ten consecutive days and proved to be the biggest story of my time in Mormon Land.
“Utah is going to be as ashamed of this as Little Rock is of the Central High School incidents,” Kelli told me in a profile I wrote about her. Her comparing what happened at East High School with Little Rock in 1957 seemed a stretch then. But this once anonymous girl had gone global, fielding phone calls from the Clinton White House, NBC’s “Today Show” and speaking live on the BBC. College and university gay and gender studies programs clamoured for her to visit their campuses. National awards and speaking invitations were coming in from as far away as Washington, D.C., San Francisco and New York City. Her life and the story had essentially gone pre-internet viral.
What wasn’t public was that because Peterson’s father worked as a copy editor for The Salt Lake Tribune features department, I had easy access to her.
In the middle of what would be my biggest and queerest coverage, my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hired me away from The Salt Lake Tribune. Peterson would be in college when the courts ruled in 2000 that students had a right to meet in gay-straight alliances. Now they are a permanent fixture.
They marched prouder and danced harder on the downtown streets of Salt Lake City for one of the biggest Pride celebrations to date. Each year, now Utah’s Pride is the state’s second-largest event, second only to the annual Days of ’47 Parade, a statewide celebration called Pioneer Day. This is where many Mormons dress in period clothing to commemorate their arrival in Utah on July 24, 1847.
*****
The last time I was in Salt Lake City in July 2023, I jumped on the Utah Trax Green Line from Salt Lake City International Airport and marvelled at the expansion and differences. The old Tribune building on Main Street is no longer part of the newspaper. The LDS Church has embarked on a massive downtown revitalizing project that’s still ongoing. The growth is explosive with new condominiums and apartments galore. There were many more restaurants, scores of tourists like me. The effect feels Disney-like. Newness brings new social issues. Hundreds of homeless people are now living in tents, sleeping bags and gathered in clusters, especially around and inside the futuristic-looking Salt Lake Library.
Walking around I saw many more Black people than when I lived there. Back then, we made up fewer than one per cent of that state’s population. Now it’s close to two. The other thing that stood out were the high volume of rainbow stickers, flags and banners dangling from windows. My mind was blown.
A few months later, a friend of mine who’s a contributing journalist for The New York Times wrote a piece with the headline. “An Evolving Salt Lake City Hopes to Be ‘Just Like Austin,’” I had pointed her to key people to talk to during her time there. Knowing reporters don’t write the headlines, I objected to the comparison. Salt Lake City doesn’t have to aspire to be “Just Like Austin.” It’s fine the way it is. I do wonder how the Great Salt Lake’s record low water levels will impact the economy, air quality impact and long-range livability viability.
Queer is beautiful. Quirky. Odd. Salt Lake City is all of those things and more. Our own zany American Zion, city of the Latter-day Saints. The walled-off Temple Square looms like the Emerald City, Narnia or the other side of Alice’s looking glass. By no means is the place an LGBTQ+ haven but people on all political and religious spectrums manage to exist in relative peace — a unique brand of queerness.
Every few years I return to Salt Lake City and am greeted by my friends, with a holy kiss because in Utah I forged tighter bonds than any I made with people in high school or college. The place’s intensity makes you cling to your own tightly. Each time I came back, Salt Lake City seemed all the more majestic and fantastical. I notice people eating candy, ice cream and drinking syrupy sweet sodas, definitely a Utah thing. The conversations feel more alive. I feel more alive there.
In a freak twist of fate, The Sun, the city’s oldest bar serving majority gay clientele, a place where I danced, was demolished by a tornado on August 11, 1999. It’s hard for me to not think it was an act of the Mormon God. Over the last two decades The Sun rose and set for many incarnations blending the defunct The Trapp. In January of this year, it closed after the owners lost its liquor license. Then during Pride month, new owners opened the doors again to The Sun Trapp.
Conversely, a March 18, 2020, 5.7 magnitude earthquake jolted the trumpet from the hand and lips of the Angel Moroni. The golden statute had stood 210 feet atop the Salt Lake Temple for 128 years. For many it symbolizes their faith and the future coming of Christ from the book of Revelation. They removed the entire statute as part of a temple renovation. Earlier this year, thousands of followers gathered downtown to see it restored.
In a recent phone call a friend not from Utah, she blurted: “You know, you talk about more Salt Lake City than you do St. Louis, (where I grew up.)” I paused for a second and realized she was right.
The next time I’m in downtown Salt Lake City I’ll look up at the Angel Moroni and think about the era I spent dancing to RuPaul’s “Supermodel” several blocks away at The Sun.
