This weekend, I attended the Affirmation conference for the first time. There are various conferences in the Latter-day Saint/LGBTQIA+ intersection, but there are three main ones. Affirmation is the oldest, and its approach is very big tent. It welcomes every queer person (and allies) whose lives have ever intersected with the Church, which means a substantial amount of people have left the faith. North Star (which I have never been to) is a very orthodox organization and conference. And Gather, which I attended last month and last year, is more middle of the road.
There are a few contributors who are writing queer histories for the Peoples of Utah Revisited, which is my job. I've kind of taken on a role as the token gay employee for our team, but I kind of feel like an impostor, since I've only been out for two years. I thought that by attending Affirmation, I would gain more experience and feel more fully integrated into the queer community.
This year the conference was in Ogden, and I was surprised how small it was. Everyone there told me it was the smallest it's been. This year's theme was "Joyfully Authentic," but I thought most of the presentations didn't specifically connect to that. (It was surprising in general conference last week when Elder Soares disparaged being "authentic.")
I went to the opening plenary on Friday night. Joel McDonald, the senior vice president of Affirmation, told a story, but I forget what the point was, sorry! Liv Mendoza Haynes is a queer Latter-day Saint married to a man who told her story. She also spoke at Gather both last month and last year. I thought her story didn't really have a message or a point, and I make a living off of making sure people have a thesis to their stories. She said that when she came out to her mom, her mom said, "Maybe you're not lesbian. Maybe you're just fat." And then Eli McCann told his story of coming out to his parents and then finally resigning his Church membership. He is a funny guy, but sometimes his humor strikes me as a little mean spirited.
I went back on Saturday for a long day, and there were several breakout groups. The first one I attended was called "Queering Mormon History." A (straight) librarian from the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah talked about the collection of Affirmation materials housed in their special collections. (I'm always wrangling citations that use sources from the JWML special collections.) She passed around scans from the Affirmation newsletters from the past, and that was fun, but also a little disheartening to see how long people in this space have been grappling with everything. Then another speaker talked about "queering" documents. It seemed very abstract to me, and I had a hard time following her thinking. Which probably means other people had a hard time following it, since Mormon history is literally my profession.
Then I attended a group discussion for asexual (ace) or aromantic (aro) people. In my journey, I spent some time wondering if I was ace or aro, so I feel a little bit of an affinity for ace people. (Also, the other sessions at the time didn't really appeal to me.) There was an ace heteroromantic divorced woman, an aroace divorced woman, a married couple where the husband (now wife) transitioned to a woman, and another gay man married to a man who was just there to learn. I explained where I fall on the queer spectrum. If you have an x-axis with gay on one end, straight on the other, and bi in the middle, I am completely on the gay end. But if you have a y-axis with different levels of intensity, I'm not at the top of the y-axis. But I am still gay enough not to be ace or gray ace.
Then we had our main plenary session. First the president of Affirmation did some business proceedings, which were boring.
Then Taylor Petrey, a scholar of religion and straight ally, gave a presentation. I was happy to introduce myself to him before his presentation as a fellow scholar, and he was very friendly and chatty. In his lecture about his new book, Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos, he discussed how Latter-day Saint conceptions of marriage, sealings, family, and reproduction have changed over time. For example, there was a pioneer couple where the husband was infertile, so Brigham Young authorized another man to impregnate the wife, and the children belonged solely to the wife and the infertile husband, not the biological father. After his presentation, I told him how when I was working at the Church History Department, we were working on a document about two men who were sealed to each other in the 1840s in a practice known as adoption sealings. In the comments of the document, I wrote, "No fair! I wish I could be sealed to a man!"
Then Laurie Lee Hall shared some stories from her upcoming memoir. She is famous for being the chief architect for the Church and a former bishop and stake president before she was excommunicated for transitioning. She helped design the expansion of the MTC, but then she didn't get to see it completed. But she was invited on a VIP tour of the MTC two days after she was excommunicated.
I made some friends who invited me to lunch with them before the afternoon sessions.
In the afternoon, I attended a discussion group for those of us who still attend church. (Our main facilitator couldn't fly out from Florida because of the hurricane, so of course we did it without him.) There was a lesbian, a trans woman, an ace mom of a gay son, a gay man whose husband wasn't there, and a gay man who was there with his non-LDS husband. When I was first coming to terms with my orientation in 2022, I assumed that any gay person who attended church would have to be very orthodox and conservative and accept all the Church's positions. But as I've spent more time in this space, I've learned that there's actually a lot of us who are more progressive/nuanced and question the Church's policies, even as we find value in attending church, for a variety of reasons. (The more conservative ones flock to North Star, so I haven't met as many of them.)
Then all together, we watched a documentary called A Long Way from Heaven: The Rainbow Y Story. It discussed queer issues at BYU. It was mostly about BYU since early 2020, but there were some older aspects as well. They included clips from the "It Gets Better at Brigham Young University" YouTube video from 2012, which came out while I was at BYU. I remember watching it, and I admire the bravery of those students, because I wasn't ready to be open at that time. The documentary also played some older hurtful comments from Ernest Wilkinson and Boyd K. Packer. I mostly liked the movie, but the tone made me a little uncomfortable. There was a BYU employee sitting near me, so I asked what he thought about it, and he expressed his frustrations with things at BYU right now. Indeed, almost everyone I have talked to is frustrated with the administration at BYU currently.
Then in the evening, we had a communal catered dinner. It was good to meet and talk to more people.
I was glad to get more experience and learn more things in this space. I think that the people I meet at the Gather conferences are more in line with my values. Affirmation also had a lot more older people. And I felt like the presentations at Gather had more of a message or point to them, whereas the Affirmation presentations were more individual stories. (One is not necessarily better than another, just different.)
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But I don't want to just talk about Affirmation, so here are other things from this week. If you're only interested in Affirmation, you are excused.
Thursday evening, I ran up Mueller Park. I don't usually go there, because North Canyon is better in almost every way, but I had less time. It was prettier than the closer trails, but still, this year's leaves haven't been as amazing.
Many grocery stores sell holiday socks in the seasonal aisle, but they're usually women's socks. After getting items from Burger King's Addams Family menu for dinner, I stopped at the grocery store and was delighted to see men's haunted house socks. I simply had to buy them, because they go perfectly with my haunted house sweater! (I'm disappointed it's been too hot to wear a sweater yet. And do you think I should buy this sweater?)
Recently, I have noticed a random hot dog stand near my neighborhood in a fast-food parking lot, and it's only open at night. Since I want to try every restaurant in North Salt Lake, I decided to try it, after 9 p.m. The guy is not a native English speaker, and he asked if I wanted mushrooms, as his tongs were on the onions. I said no. So then he moved his tongs away from the onions, and I said, "Onions, yes." But he still put on mushrooms and no onions. It seems pretty hard to mix up mushrooms and onions, even if you aren't a native English speaker! And he asked "chile?" and I thought it would be chili, like a chili dog. But it was a spicy chile. So I got a hot dog, wrapped in bacon, with mushrooms and a green chile. It was the strangest hot dog I have ever had. I can tolerate mushrooms, but I don't particularly enjoy them.
And here are this week's AI dream images.
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| Winifred the Witch, riding on a broom, follows Kate the historian in a warehouse |
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| at a church potluck, Ann cuts an Andes candy that has rainbow frosting on top and minty cream inside |
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| Mark considers swimming laps in the water that has pooled in the public shower, but he decides not to |
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| an octopus wearing a beanie slides around the ice on the road |
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| Mark stops by a stand to buy Harvest Snaps, but they give him sausage links instead |
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| people compliment Mark's Cookie Monster footie pajamas, but he doesn't want to keep them |
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| a junk food blogger is annoyed that there are three caramel-apple pork products |
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| Mark's family stays in a cabin hotel in the mountains with plumbing and electricity |
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| the Monkees sing a song about their own shoddy stage by a natural spring next to a shoddy building |
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| a junk food editor invites his reviewers to a party where he publicly shames a man who killed his own son |
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| Mark has a sweater that has Christmas lights and can play music via Bluetooth. He tries to get it to play "Fix You" |
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| The Latter-day Saint meetinghouse puts carpet on the floor of the gym |
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| Mark finds a small caramel apple Squishmallow, but then he remembers he already has one (I like the Funko Pop! in the background) |
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| Grandma tells Mark she was furious |
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Here's this week's pumpkinundation roundup!
Harmons pumpkin pie struck me as less flavorful than most pumpkin pie. But I liked the crust. 6/10.
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