The Book of Mormon Girl (13 page)

On May 18, 1993, Church leaders identified the objects of surveillance, when Boyd K. Packer, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered a speech to the Mormon All-Church Coordinating Council declaring that the three greatest “dangers” to the Church were the “gay-lesbian movement,” “the feminist movement,” and the “so-called scholars or intellectuals.”

In June 1993, Brigham Young University fired Cecilia Konchar Farr, a feminist literary critic and my mentor. Within months, several other feminist BYU professors announced their resignations from the faculty.

Beginning on September 14, 1993, with the disfellow-
shipping of Mormon feminist Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, the Church embarked on the serial excommunication of prominent feminists and intellectuals, a group now known as the September Six.

One of the six was Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was excommunicated on September 23, 1993, at a church court held in her local ward house. Others included Paul Toscano, Mormon feminist Maxine Hanks, and renowned Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn.

Lavina Fielding Anderson continued to attend her Salt Lake City ward each week. No word was spoken of her excommunication. She was not allowed to take the sacrament. She was allowed, though, to play the piano in Relief Society, the only church calling permitted of a nonmember.

In 1995, Lavina and the Mormon Alliance published a first volume of case reports documenting more than twenty cases over the last decade in which tithe-paying Mormon church leaders, including bishops, Sunday School teachers, missionaries, and Scout troop leaders had been convicted of sexually abusing children. Much of the sexual abuse Lavina documented had taken place in Mormon ward houses, campouts, and prayer meetings, often with the knowledge and inaction of other church leaders. Some parents of abused children had been excommunicated for “embarrassing the Church.”

In 1995, Lavina asked her stake president what she could
do in order to be rebaptized. He responded that she needed to stop thinking that “the General Authorities could ever do wrong.”

On May 9, 1995, Janice Merrill Allred, coeditor of the Mormon Alliance Case Reports and a Mormon feminist theologian who had condemned the abuse of children within the Church, was summoned to her local ward house for a disciplinary court. She usually walked to church, but she was on crutches, and so was driven by her sister, Mormon feminist and Mormon Alliance cofounder Margaret Merrill Toscano. Lavina Fielding Anderson walked Janice to the door of the court. Behind closed doors, Janice was excommunicated by a council of twelve men.

On June 5, 1996, Brigham Young University fired Mormon feminist English professor Gail Turley Houston. She had written an article in an off-campus student newspaper revealing that she had prayed to both Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

In 1997, Lavina Fielding Anderson published the third volume of case reports presenting essays on the fates of distressed Brigham Young University students, wayward missionaries, gay and lesbian Mormons, and Mormon intellectuals who had been fired or excommunicated for their scholarship.

In 1997, the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embarked on the beginnings of what would be a ten-year campaign to eradicate the possibility of same-
sex civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians in the Western United States by making a $500,000 donation to a defense of marriage amendment initiative campaign in Alaska. Over the next three years, the Church mobilized money and resources in support of anti-same-sex marriage efforts in Hawaii and California.

Mormon feminist and Mormon Alliance cofounder Margaret Merrill Toscano was excommunicated on November 30, 2000.

In 2003, Lavina Fielding Anderson spoke about her excommunication at a public gathering of one thousand people in Salt Lake City. “Mormonism is my world. It’s my language, my people, my music, my history, even my leaders,” she said. “My God is the Mormon God. I’m not rejecting Mormonism. I’m not trying to reform Mormonism. I am trying to remind Mormons of the truth and power and glory of its paradoxical assertion of absolute freedom and absolute love, a paradox that is reconciled in Jesus Christ.”

During this decade, I was twenty, twenty-two, twenty-three. The Church I was born into, baptized into, raised up in, the Church of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, the Church I had attended as many as twelve hours a week every week of my life, and tithed to, my Church had declared me a double enemy. Not the multilevel marketers who used Mormon membership records to defraud their fellow Saints, or the CIA intelligence experts devising legal justifications for torture, nor the pedophile bishops who cost the Church
millions of tithing dollars in legal judgments; not untruth, not fear, not greed. But me, and the others like me I met while a student at Brigham Young University—a small cohort of Mormon liberals, trying to find or make a place for ourselves within a tradition we loved.

I graduated from BYU, without a husband, returned my diploma in protest, and left Utah for a PhD program in Los Angeles. Sometimes I dizzily wandered the palm-lined concrete canyons of the city, or hid away in cool library corridors, or wept in the back row of Black churches on Easter Sunday, or canned soup at the great Mormon-owned welfare cannery on Eleventh Street in East Los Angeles. On Saturday nights, I put on my black cha-cha heels and wore my heartbreaks like invisible ruby earrings, glinting in the dark. On Sunday mornings, I got up and went to church. I kept going, I kept going. I sang hymns and taught Sunday School classes, no matter how desolate I felt inside. Sometimes I found refuge among the Korean- and Spanish-language Mormon congregations of Los Angeles, Mormon places unpenetrated by the purge. Sometimes I visited a gray-haired waitress at Canter’s Jewish deli in the Fairfax district, she who brought me my first plate of
matzah brei
, and in a spirited mix of English, Yiddish, Spanish, and Hungarian told me how the Holocaust had driven her family from Hungary to Mexico and taught me the world-shaping scope of other purges. Sometimes I marched among thousands of student protestors or striking hotel workers, and I sat down in city intersections to
be arrested. Whenever I sat down, I sat down as a Mormon feminist mourning her own exile from the Church of her ancestors, though to look at me no one could tell.

Not a word about the firings or excommunications passed between me and my parents—not about the teachers and the writers I loved, or what had happened to them or the great sadness I felt or the martial edge of Mormon orthodoxy I had experienced. Because orthodox Mormonism was still their home. It was their four walls, their seven days, their twenty-four hours. What could I have possibly said that would not have been simply a source of shame and disappointment to them? What could I have possibly said that could have been to them more than just evidence of my own personal failings? Perhaps I wanted to protect them from shame. Perhaps I wanted to protect myself from feeling the brunt of their shame. In any case, we did not speak about any of it. Nor did my brother, or my sisters, really—each of us consumed privately, in our own way, with the hammering out of the kinds of Mormons we would be, with the serving of missions, the finding of Mormon spouses, the launching of careers, the subduing of the shadows that manifest in every life. We each wrestled in those years with our shadows, but we did not speak much about them. Once in a while, I might mention the Mormon purge of feminists and intellectuals to my fellow PhD students, especially the small and enchanting crew of dark-haired, cigarette-smoking Marxists I loved, each one of them being in some way an exile from their own ancestral
contexts. During breaks in our literary theory seminars, they would listen, nod in solidarity, then scrub their butts out under their heels before we dutifully returned to Heidegger and Althusser. But aside from my books, the place I felt safest was on Sunday evenings in the kitchen of my Utah-born grandmother. She had moved to Los Angeles during the Great Depression, and when she arrived, strangers on the streetcars reached out to feel her head for horns. Now widowed, in her late seventies, living in a Los Angeles suburb, she took me in and asked me no questions. We shared the comfort of plain and buttery little dinners, her deep lonesomeness holding hands with my own. Late Sunday nights, back in my tiny studio apartment, I put my head on my bed and cried and cried, and demanded that God lift the fear and hurt from my heart, then fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamed of my great-grandmothers dressed in white.

Though I spoke few words about it to the people with whom I shared my everyday life, during this decade, Mormons like me found ourselves in the grip of a terrible turn in Mormon history, in the grip of a fear provoked in part by the strength of our Mormon feminist vision: a fear of the full, glorious, strange, and difficult humanity of our Mormon past; a fear of women who openly claimed the power of a Heavenly Mother; a fear of mothers and fathers who refused to sacrifice their children to protect the public image of the Church; a fear of our own gay and lesbian
relatives who refused the confines of the closet.
Exile
. It took a decade to come to terms with the fact that the Church we loved had declared us its enemies. And slowly the immensity of our work dawned on us, as we realized it would take a superhuman strength born of stubbornness, anger, desperation, and love to hold on to the faith of our ancestors. Some of us stopped talking about our thoughts and feelings for the sake of maintaining our peace with husbands, wives, parents, and brothers and sisters, for the sake of keeping our homes, our seats on wooden pews in familiar ward houses. Some of us dropped out of Mormon life, refusing to reveal our ancestral pasts even to our natural-born children. Some of us hung on, in daylight, in darkness, to the tenuous and tender threads of a Mormon exile community. We hid out in intermountain suburbs. We pulled ourselves back across the plains to college towns and big East Coast cities. We gathered by the rivers of the internet and laughed and wept when we remembered Zion. From Boise, Mesa, Los Angeles, from Boston and Philadelphia, we lived the whole series of excommunications and firings. And we too kept files, evidence of all that had happened, was happening in this great and terrible turn. Through the years, I saved clandestine copies of all the documents pertaining to Cecilia’s firing and Lavina’s excommunication; a copy of the 1993 “three greatest enemies” speech; copies of newspapers articles and Mormon Alliance case reports. I kept files because I needed evidence
to substantiate the fear I felt inside, evidence I might need if I had to go into a closed room with twelve men and defend myself.

We exiles too compiled files as if our lives depended on it.

•   •   •

But files do not make for an actual life.

For years I told myself that if I were a better Mormon, if I had milder thoughts, a tamer spirit—if I were just
better
, God would turn it all around and reward me with a good Mormon husband, someone who would understand not only our common faith but also the challenges it entailed for women like me. One Sunday, when I was twenty-five years old, I found myself in a chapel full of unmarried Mormon women who also believed that if they were better Mormons, with milder thoughts, and a tamer spirit, God would reward them with good Mormon husbands too. Most of the women, they were nearing forty.

What should I do?
I asked myself.
What should I do?
I asked the white-haired bishop of my Mormon singles ward. His name was Tom Anderson. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, a man who as the leader of a congregation of single Los Angeles Mormons had heard the human story in all of its predictable variety. He invited me to his house in Los Angeles one Sunday afternoon. Pink and red roses bloomed in the front yard. We sat down at the dining room table.

“We often ask God over and over again what it is we
should do,” Bishop Anderson said. He smiled. “But sometimes we just have to do and seek God in the process.”

And so I
did
. I did, and I did.

I did go to a party one night in Venice Beach. And I did see a freckle-faced, blue-eyed Jewish man wearing a surfer’s watch walk in the front door. And I did like him. Oh, how I did like him. My heart said, “He looks like home to me.”

On our first date, we listened to country music and drove around nighttime Los Angeles in his oversize white GMC Jimmy.

On our second date, David and I went skateboarding in Venice Beach. “You’re in love,” a passing stranger hollered at us.

Yes, you are right
, I thought.

Wherever David was, I noticed, there was always food, music, and people. In his Venice Beach apartment, salt air wafted through the open windows, and dub reggae or punk rock or opera played on the stereo. He bustled and spun about the kitchen, soaking exotic dried mushrooms, roasting peppers, and flipping them in hot pans. He listened and held my hand when I talked about feeling sad sometimes and all the reasons I felt sad, and he did not wince—visibly at least—when God came into the conversation. After all, he was Jewish. He understood what it felt like to have God in the conversation, how it felt to belong to a people, and how it felt to be the only one of your kind in the room. We fell in love during long study sessions at Venice Beach coffeehouses and teaching assistants’ union meetings. The week our union
went on strike, David signed up for every picket shift, and he ferried water around to each of the picket sites in his big white truck. “This,” I said to myself, “is a man who could make it across the plains.”

One jasmine-scented spring Los Angeles night, we found ourselves sitting on a curb outside a friend’s wedding reception.

“You know, we’re going to get married,” I told him.

He smiled, shook his head, looked at his feet, said, “Slowly, slowly.”

I was not deterred.

“And this Mormon thing, it’s not going away. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

Doctrine teaches that only couples married in Mormon temples reach the highest levels of heaven. To my family, my choosing to marry David would mean that I was choosing
not
to be with them in heaven. But for me, choosing David meant placing my trust in a God bigger than doctrine. It meant choosing my joy, my best friend, my chance to create a family, choosing all of these as indivisible elements of my own spiritual well-being. It meant marrying a man who saw no enmity in me, a man who would never put me on trial or audit my heart for heresy. Certainly even a Mormon like me deserved that much in a marriage.