19 Jun 2025 Silence, Scholarship, and Pride: Two Books Reframing LGBTQ+ Mormon Narratives

As Pride Month invites us to reflect on the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ equality, it’s essential to center voices that navigate the often-painful intersections of faith, identity, and institutional power. Two important works—I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders edited by Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith, and Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences by Gregory Prince—offer deeply personal and rigorously researched perspectives on what it means to be queer within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The essays in Pray and Smith’s I Spoke to You with Silence explore, among many topics, relationships, joy, persecution, shame, community, and the experience and effects of living in the margins of faith and identity. From the perspectives of people of marginalized genders and sexual orientations, the book explores what it means to be shaped by Mormonism while being systematically excluded from the theology and culture of the religion. The writing is intimate, aching, sometimes hopeful, and reflects both the institutional silence many LGBTQ+ Mormons face and the strength required to survive and speak in their own time.

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Rather than offering a neat resolution or a polemic against religion, I Spoke to You with Silence explores the spiritual complexity of people who, in a variety of ways, may embrace, reject, question, mourn, or celebrate their faith, but refuse to be erased by it . During Pride Month—a time to celebrate authenticity, community, and resistance—these voices are especially resonant. Readers are reminded that many queer people are not outside religion looking in, but inside it, trying to live fully and honestly in spaces that still ask them to hide.

Gregory Prince’s Gay Rights and the Mormon Church offers a complementary but very different lens. A scholar and biographer, Prince examines the LDS Church’s historical engagement with LGBTQ+ rights, particularly during the AIDS crisis, California’s Proposition 8 campaign, and the 2015 “November Policy” that labeled same-sex marriage as apostasy. Through careful archival research and interviews, Prince documents how even well-meaning intentions by church leaders often led to deep harm, alienation, and long-term consequences for both individuals and the institution.

These books exemplify how academic publishing can amplify marginalized voices and promote meaningful dialogue beyond typical cultural fault lines. University presses play a crucial role in advancing this kind of scholarship and storytelling. We provide a platform for rigorous work that might otherwise go unnoticed, and in doing so, help shape public understanding—and policy—on issues of gender, sexuality, identity, and religion. Both books challenge us to confront the cost of silence—and to celebrate the courage it takes to speak.

Susan Wegener is project editor at the University of Utah Press.