By Lisa Duggan
This article appeared in the July 13, 2009 edition of The Nation.
June 24, 2009
DAVID DANIELS
Utah gays protest Proposition 8 in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square.
Salt Lake City
Forget everything you think you know about Utah. Yes, it’s the reddest
state in the union and the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (LDS). For the past twenty-five years, Republicans
have had a virtual lock on statewide offices. Utah hasn’t voted for a
Democrat for president since 1964, and last year the state chose John
McCain over Barack Obama by almost a 2-to-1 margin.
But here in Salt Lake City, it’s a different story. The city and
surrounding counties are a lovely blue. The current and previous
mayors–Ralph Becker and Rocky Anderson–are well-known progressive
Democrats with excellent records on the environment, gay and civil
rights, disability access and other municipal issues, and Salt Lake
County, home to four of the five most populous cities in the state, went
for Obama in 2008.
Then there’s Salt Lake City’s queer community, whose smart, creative and
coalition-building strategies could provide a model for gay activists
across the country.
That last claim requires a bit of explanation. Last fall I lived in Salt
Lake City. As a leftist and New York City dyke, I had expected to find a
conservative city and a quietly assimilationist gay community. Instead,
I was repeatedly blown away by the progressive politics and outright
queerness of the capital city, which is about 40 percent Mormon.
I was in Salt Lake City in November when the passage of California’s
Proposition 8 generated national outrage against the Mormon Church for
its role in sending money and volunteers to help antigay forces take
away the right of California’s same-sex couples to marry. A few national
LGBT figures, most notably gay pundit Dan Savage, called for a boycott
of Utah to punish its majority Mormon population. In Salt Lake City, I
joined a furious crowd, including many gay Mormons and ex-Mormons, at a
November 7 protest at the LDS Temple. The scene was a jumble of mixed
messages, with signs ranging from Love Makes a Family, to Separate
Church and State, to Brigham Young Had 55 Wives, I Want 1! But no one I
saw advocated a boycott. Most seemed to agree with KRCL-FM public radio
station personality Troy Williams, referred to by some Utahns as their
homegrown Harvey Milk, who challenged Savage on his hourlong program,
calling for an influx of queer migrants to the state rather than a
boycott. Perhaps a New Queer Pioneer movement, modeled on the sanctified
Mormon pioneers of the nineteenth century, would do more to shrink the
impact of LDS antigay bigotry than any boycott ever could.
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