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Gay Mormon Characters Step Out of the Shadows

By Kellie Kotraba
Religion News Service graphic by Tiffany McCallen and Kellie Kotraba/Columbia FA
Religion News Service graphic by Tiffany McCallen and Kellie Kotraba/Columbia FAVS
May 22, 2013
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Twenty years ago, a gay Mormon character stepped onstage for the first time. His name was Joe Pitt, and he was in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.

Pitt lived in New York with a good reputation and a bad marriage to a woman addicted to Valium. As colleagues dealt with the devastation and uncertainty of AIDS — it was the 1980s — he grappled with openly acknowledging his sexuality. He was Mormon. And gay. And the two didn’t mix.

Before Pitt, there was a gay Mormon character in a novel: Brigham Anderson, in Allan Drury’s Advise and Consent, published in 1959. But words like “gay” and “homosexual” weren’t used; it was all innuendo.

Now, the scene has changed: Gay Mormon characters and themes have a growing role in theater and literature.

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Religion News Service graphic by Tiffany McCallen and Kellie Kotraba/Columbia FAVS
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