Introducing Carol Lynn Pearson and Her Work

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone and welcome to a very exciting and important week on Mormon Stories podcast. It is Carolyn Pearson Week where we will be introducing to our current audience. Definitely one of the most important interviewees ever on Mormon Stories podcast. Absolutely a top five favorite of mine in terms of a beautiful, brilliant human who's wise, but also one of the most important voices in the history of, of 20th and 21st century Mormonism. Her name is Carolyn Pearson. She is a poet, she's an author, she's a playwright, she's written songs. She has been an advocate for women. She's been an advocate for Heavenly Mother for LGBT Mormons.

John Dehlin [00:00:45] She was an advocate for LGBT Mormons before anyone else was. And she's written some of the most important books ever in the history of Mormonism. She wrote a book called Goodbye, I Love youe where it was an international bestseller where she talked about nursing her husband to his death with aids. And she was, you know, Oprah, Phil Donahue level international bestseller. She wrote the primary song, I'll Walk with you, the lyrics for that. She wrote the lyrics for My Turn on Earth, the musical, the Mormon musical. She wrote the book the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, which talks about how polygamy still haunts us today. She has written so many, so many important books.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] And so what we're going to be doing this week on Carolyn Pearson Week, we're going to be rebroadcasting two of my epic interviews with Carolyn Pearson. This is one of the earliest video interviews I ever did. It was episodes 173 through 177, released August 15, 2010. So this goes way back lower than episode 200.

John Dehlin [00:01:51] We're going to basically take that full interview that I broke up into like four or five parts. So we're going to munge it into a single episode. Reintroduce you to this brilliant interview with Carolyn Pearson. That's going to be part one of Carolyn Pearson Week. Part two of Carolyn Pearson Week is we're going to rebroadcast our interview with her, which was episodes 860 and 861, where she talks about her book the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy that was released in January of 2018. I promise you, you'll find Carolyn Pearson to be funny, wise, witty, brilliant, courageous, all the things. And then if that weren't enough on Carolyn Pearson Week Part 3, we're going to have Carolyn Pearson back on Mormon Stories podcast because Signature Books is now releasing part one of a four part series.

John Dehlin [00:02:46] It turns out that Carolyn Pearson has been keeping diaries of all her interactions with Mormon scholars, with Mormon general authorities, with Mormons, Mormon leadership for, I don't know, 50 plus years. And so recently Signature Books released part one of a four part series on her diaries. It's volume one, 1956 to 1990. The book is called the Diaries of Carolyn Pearson, Mormon author, feminist and activist. And we're going to have Carolyn Pearson back on Mormon Stories, hopefully with Barbara Jones Brown. And we're gonna talk about this amazing new book that's come out and we hope to follow this entire series because I can promise you there's a really important, interesting, informative history in her diaries.

John Dehlin [00:03:36] So that's it. Enjoy this three part series with the brilliant, the wonderful, the wise Carolyn Pearson. Part one is my original interview with her. Part two is the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, which you will enjoy. And then part three will be bringing her Back. And when we bring her back, we hope to have you, our viewers and listeners join us so that we can y' all can ask her comments, y' all can honor her, you can tell her how much her work has meant to you. And please buy this book and start reading it. And we can talk about the book as well. Kind of like a book club kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:04:15] So please buy the book. Kudos to Signature Books. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories and enjoy parts 1, 2 and 3 of Carol Lynn Pearson Week. Goodbye, I love you. I'll walk with you. Let's circle the wagons and it's our turn on earth. Take care everybody and we'll see you in the show.

John Dehlin [00:04:40] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. I'm John Dehlin. Today I have with me a very special guest. I feel like I say that every time. This time I mean it extra specially. Well, I have with us today author, playwright, artist, Carolyn Pearson. Carolyn, welcome to Mormon Stories podcast.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:05:05] John, I thank you for inviting me. I'm grateful to be here.

John Dehlin [00:05:10] Well, I have to warn you up front, give you a little disclaimer that I may not be at my complete best today during an interview, but I want to tell you why. There's three reasons and this is not a setup, this is factual. The first reason is this book, goodbye, I Love youe, which I believe you published first in 1986, which we'll be discussing as the main frame for today's interview.

John Dehlin [00:05:39] It says here the true story of a wife, her homosexual husband and a love that transcended tragedy. Should say a Mormon wife, but I realize why they didn't do that. The second reason that I haven't Been getting enough sleep lately. Is this second book, no More Goodbyes, Circling the wagons around our gay loved ones, also by you.

John Dehlin [00:06:07] And the third reason is one that sort of confirms at times my belief in some supreme power being when I'm feeling a little less confident. And that's that this morning at 6am after getting to bed well past 1 in the morning, I received a call from an old friend.

John Dehlin [00:06:27] And the old friend had no idea what I was doing this morning. He had no idea that I interviewed Bruce Bastian a week or two ago. But he knew that I was maybe a safe place for him to share some feelings and thoughts. And he called me this morning at 6am and woke me up and started telling me the story of how he's always known he was gay.

John Dehlin [00:06:56] We knew each other growing up. How he talked to his bishops. They encouraged him to go on a mission, that the mission would fix it. He prayed and fasted. He went on to return home from his mission, didn't fix it. But he was told that maybe if he got married, when he got married first time he had that experience with a woman, that would fix it.

John Dehlin [00:07:22] And now he's several children into his marriage and he's trying to decide what to do with his life. And that's the theme for today. And that's the theme of your first book.

John Dehlin [00:07:33] Good.

John Dehlin [00:07:34] Why I Love youe.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:07:34] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:07:35] So those are my reasons for being a little bit droopy eyed. You'll have to forgive me, but I will be up to this interview, I promise.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:07:44] Of course.

Early Life, Personality, and Artistic Beginnings

John Dehlin [00:07:45] But in typical Mormon stories fashion, before we dive into the main substance of your life's work, I would love to have you talk about anything you want to talk about related to your heritage, your ancestry and your upbringing. And especially touching on the things that might be relevant to the things we're going to discuss later today.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:08:06] Sure. Thank you. My Mormon heritage is a very deep and strong one. I have George Warren Serrine, who came across on the ship Brooklyn, went on to help found Mesa, Arizona. I have Thomas Moore.

John Dehlin [00:08:24] I can't chip the ice. You can't forget the chipping ice.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:08:26] He was one of the guys who was let overboard to chip the ice. True. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:08:33] To keep the boat afloat or whatever.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:08:34] Well, when they encountered this terrible storm out in the ocean, I have Thomas Morris, who marched with the Mormon Battalion. We have his diary, how he boiled his second shirt for something to eat. Leather, I am sure. I have my own grandmother, not my great grandmother, but my own grandmother, my mother's mother, Sarah Oakey, who walked across the plains as an eight year old girl. All of those stories have been hugely important to me as I grew up and are now. I take my Mormon heritage very, very seriously. So I was born in Salt Lake City. My mother and father were a bit older when they married and had us. They had five children. We spent five years out in Gusher, Utah. You've never heard of that, have you?

John Dehlin [00:09:36] Never.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:09:37] Two of those years out on a place we euphemistically called a ranch, had no running water or electricity. We had to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night. And then we moved to Provo. My mother saved her salary as a school teacher so that she could get us out of Gusher and we moved to Provo, which was a very good place for me. I had a wonderful experience going to the late great by high school and then BYU in the drama department, majoring in drama and minoring in English and being in a lot of plays and having really a fine experience at byu. And we could go on any number of directions here, but help me figure out where we want to go.

John Dehlin [00:10:31] Now,

John Dehlin [00:10:34] I'm going to not put you on the spot and try and explore which decade that was, but was the drama department considered at all edgy or progressive? No, it was very.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:10:46] Oh, it was. No, it was very standard. Well, you see, there's always something a little bit edgy about theater. There just is. You can't have theater without pushing some of the borders a little bit. But we didn't push them a lot. And we occasionally had to rewrite a line in order for it to be acceptable. When I played Lady Bracknell in the Importance of Being Earnest, rather than saying to what's his name? Do you smoke? That line was rewritten. So I said, do you golf? Absurd kinds of things like that. So no, the drama department was very, very safe. And I had some really good professors there. And I really. I have best memories of being at byu.

John Dehlin [00:11:32] Was this pre Ernest Wilkinson or during Ernest Wilkinson?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:11:34] During.

John Dehlin [00:11:35] Okay. Those are good years.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:11:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:11:41] All right. So you're acting. I imagine you're getting good grades.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:11:46] Very good grades, Yeah. I was always a good student.

John Dehlin [00:11:51] A couple awards here and there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:11:52] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:11:53] Some writing awards. Is that right?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:11:57] I got. I won first place in a poetry contest there. And two years running, I got the best actress award in the drama department at byu. Uh huh. For Sarah in the play jb A modern poetic retelling of the story of Job. And then my favorite, as I played Joan of Arc in Ennui's version Called the Lark. Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:29] So were you. I mean, this is an embarrassing question, but were you kind of a. A bit of an item, bit of a catch at the university?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:12:36] I can imagine you're speaking like, did the boys all come in my direction? Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I had a lot of good friends, male and female, and I did some dating. But no, I was not one of the girls who was always out there dating and being pursued. But I did have some good experiences with guys

John Dehlin [00:13:01] overall.

Faith, Testimony, and Youth in the Church

John Dehlin [00:13:02] How would you characterize your relationship with the church, your experiences in the church as a youth and as a young

John Dehlin [00:13:08] adult,

John Dehlin [00:13:12] just in terms of how constructive or healthy it was for your psyche?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:13:20] My psyche. I really feel that I absorbed an awful lot of the good stuff of the Mormon culture. I had a lot of good people there, MIA leaders and BYU professors, and I absorbed an awful lot of good stuff.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:13:54] The very first memory that I have of there being a little bit of pain that crept into my psyche was in high school when. And I had sort of known about polygamy. But when my very dear seminary teacher bore us, his testimony that we have many, many mothers in heaven, that polygamy is indeed an eternal principle that we will all come to understand and embrace when we are sufficiently righteous.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:14:26] And I remember walking home from BYU High School to my home on 6th north and 6th east, with something very heavy in my heart that I'd never felt. And I said, something's wrong here. I don't know what it is, but if this is my relationship, if this is what God has in mind for me, if this is God's plan for everybody, I don't get it. I just don't get it. There's something skewed here.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:14:59] And, well, I must actually back up a bit and say, truly, truly, I was born into women's issues. I remember from before we moved to Salt Lake. I have this odd memory, and I don't know where it came from, but I know it's a memory from when we were out in Gusher. I could have been maybe 10 or 12 or something.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:15:24] I remember saying to somebody, and I don't know who, but I said, well, I guess the only good thing about being a woman is you don't have to marry one. And I have thought back, where did I get that idea?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:15:42] My parents never gave us any idea to suggest that boys are better than girls. I truly, as I went along, I felt myself to be a real favorite of my father. My mother died when I was 15, but nobody ever said anything like that to me. But you see, it is in the air that we breathe.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:16:06] So somehow I came to this world looking around and saying, why is it that everything important seems to be male? Why is it that everything in church, everything in the Bible, Why is it that God is male? Most people don't even begin to ask, that's just the way it is. For whatever reason, I did not just say, this is just the way it is. I said, this is the way it is. Why?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:16:38] And it really hurt me. It hurt me. Because if that is the case, that everything important is male, where does that leave me? And truly, that stayed with me for a very, very long time until somehow I figured out, you know, it's not me that's wrong. It's our perceptions, our system of explaining the world and the heavens that is wrong or incomplete or however you want to say it. But I recall truly, when I was at byu, having this good experience that I told you about. I would go to the special collections library, I think, fourth floor, and I would go through all of the shelves of books written by the brethren, searching for any little crumb.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:17:39] I mastered the art of opening the book to the back and looking for W for women, m for mother in heaven, and any little crumb that I found. And believe me, they were few and far between. I would just devour it so hungrily and then take another look and say, isn't this pathetic?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:18:02] This is so pathetic that I, as a woman in a system that is laid out for me as God's best plan, have to be so hungry and be fed so little about who I am as a. As a woman. That pain was enormous.

John Dehlin [00:18:23] So you were feeling pain in high school and college over the status of women?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:18:28] Absolutely. And not really over my own personal status, because I was always successful and well regarded personally in the things that I did by teachers, by relatives, by everybody. But it was this larger thing, theological cosmological, of the place of women in the universe that to me, was so extraordinarily unacceptable.

John Dehlin [00:19:00] And before we. I want to dive into that pretty deeply in a little while. Let me just ask you. Do you feel like you perceived yourself as having a traditional LDS testimony in spite of these doubts or concerns? Can you remember the burning in the bosom or spiritual confirmation or certainty? Or did you also not benefit from that type of.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:19:27] I have never had some, what we might call numinous experience of being taken over by the Spirit, saying whatever to me. But I was very comfortable in accepting everything that I was taught, and it all made good sense. To me, except for these huge bumps of which we will speak and are speaking. So, I mean, it was just my life. I lived in Happy Valley and there were no real alternative ways to think about anything except to just fall off the end of the earth. This is what it was. And much of it was very nourishing to me.

John Dehlin [00:20:17] So you were swimming in the water of Mormonism and having a good time, but with a couple of big questions.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:20:23] Yes, yes, indeed.

John Dehlin [00:20:24] But you reflect on your youth and early church experiences overall favorably.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:20:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:30] Maybe even feel blessed to have had them?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:20:33] I think so. Well, you see, if we're going to get really, really broadly cosmological about why we come to this earth and all of that, I believe that the Mormon Church has served me enormously in providing for me all the good nourishing things and providing for me all the conflict that I need for the kind of personal growth that I believe we're here for.

John Dehlin [00:21:01] So nourishment and conflict, both.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:04] Good and bad.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:05] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:21:06] Okay. Okay.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:09] So

John Dehlin [00:21:12] before we dive in, do you have any recollection on what you would have perceived your life being like back when you were graduating from college and thinking about the path ahead, the road ahead? What do you think you envisioned for yourself back then, what your life would be like?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:36] Oh, I was going to be a pretty, certainly a pretty traditional Mormon person with a traditional Mormon family, but certainly having opportunity to exercise my writing and perhaps my acting. But I was looking forward to a very traditional Mormon life with a traditional Mormon man and being comfortable within the borders of the church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:22:15] After I graduated from the Y and I traveled for a year, we may or may not want to get into some of that, but as I went into Russia, I smuggled the Book of Mormon in and I gave it to the pastor of the whichever Christian church there. And he was. And he showed me where. Oh, here's where your Mr. Benson has signed our. So you see, I was doing. I was very much in the Mormon framework of sharing the good stuff and certainly being the kind of.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:22:51] Oh, I was the kind of good little Mormon girl that everybody would want. I didn't ever get into any kind of trouble. I never had a difficult adolescence in terms of being tempted to any of the things to go outside, behavior wise to go outside the borders, none of that ever.

John Dehlin [00:23:09] And you saw yourself becoming a housewife. Your husband would be the primary income provider. You would do some writing, maybe on the side.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:23:19] Probably I would have been open to seeing maybe a little bit more unusual configuration. The word partnership was perhaps not necessarily in My mind. But I certainly did not want to be in a marriage where I did not feel really to be a partner to everything. And I actually remember now when I would go out with a guy, I would maybe on the first or second date ask him how he felt about polygamy. Not that I had that many men coming to court me, but I, of course, I'm sure that I felt even in those early days that I was not going to get myself into a traditional situation, inasmuch as it might lessen my opportunities.

John Dehlin [00:24:25] Okay, okay. So what did art mean to you at that time? Like you're growing up, you maybe you fall in love with acting or theater, do a little writing, some poetry. But like how would you describe the force or the meaning or the purpose for you behind your self creative expression? Is that something that you were conscious of? Were you like, I have to write. That's who I am. Acting as me, you know, how important was your artistic expression to you?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:25:04] Possibly not consciously as important as I know that it really, really was throughout those years. You know, I remember the first time I was on the stage in a little primary operetta. I played Raggedy Andy. I was probably about 7 years old. I remember that clearly, what the costume looked like, felt like. And then later on when I was in plays at by high and then byu, I knew there was something profoundly wonderful about the theater and in my writing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:25:41] In fourth grade, I won $4 in a school district essay contest on why we should eat a better breakfast. And I always was good with words, 100% spelling. And I. In. In high school I began to write poetry. I have now at home a file that says poetry very bad. And a file that says poetry not quite so bad. Honestly I do.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:26:08] And. But in high school, a really important thing was that I began to keep a diary. And I don't know why I did because it wasn't like a church admonition that came a bit later. But I just really wanted to. So I started keeping a diary. And I have all my life and I have this, a massive amount of really rich material because I tell everything. So writing.

John Dehlin [00:26:41] And may that go to the right library someday.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:26:43] May it.

John Dehlin [00:26:44] And not the wrong library someday.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:26:46] We'll talk about that. I haven't decided yet. So writing these oh so embarrassingly adolescent poems and the diary that I have to read it at arm's length now because it's just so embarrassing. But you know, that's who I was. That's who we all. We all were foolish, egocentric adolescents. But writing Even this awful, bad poetry that I was writing, it was helpful to me. And as I continued writing in poetry, in the later things that happened and my diary, I knew, and I remember someplace in my diary I wrote that I feel like the more of my life or thoughts that I can articulate on paper, the more I have control over. And I think keeping a diary has been one of the things that has saved me over a number of griefs that were totally devastating.

John Dehlin [00:28:02] So therapeutic.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:28:03] Absolutely.

Literary Influences and Early Creative Writing

John Dehlin [00:28:05] Did you have any favorite writers, poets or playwrights at that stage? And were there any you were modeling after or trying to be like?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:28:15] In high school, I was crazy about Dorothy Parker, a humorist who wrote very witty, edgy, kind of rye, biting, witty poems. And I memorized a lot of her stuff.

John Dehlin [00:28:34] Dorothy Parker.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:28:35] Dorothy Parker.

John Dehlin [00:28:36] Okay.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:28:39] And in high school and in college, I would go out and give programs, you know, to ladies clubs and all of this. And so I would give some Dorothy Parker. But then in college, I truly fell in love with Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.

John Dehlin [00:28:55] Poets, right?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:28:56] Yeah. And many of the plays that I was in provided me with wonderful minds. I remember being in playing in the Heiress, playing Kathryn Sloper. I could list a dozen or more wonderful roles that I played besides Joan of Arc, that made my mind grapple with words and understand and appreciate good sentences and characterization.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:29:41] That was all a very wonderful thing to me, to put me in a place where, as you're asking, that art meant something to me. I knew that on the printed page and on the stage, magic happened, you know, and early on, somewhere in my classes at byu under dear Harold Hanson, whom I loved a lot of, to become aware that in Mormon culture, theater and art in general has been very, very promoted and valued, and that Brigham insisted that the Saints bring across the plains the books, the musical instrument. Pitt's brass band came across the Plains.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:30:32] They started building the Bowery maybe a couple of years after they were there, where concerts and the major meetings were held. And then Brigham started very quickly to build the Salt Lake Theater and said, if I were placed on a cannibal island and given the task of educating that people, I would straightaway build a theater for the purpose.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:30:55] Mormonism has always had a tremendous. A lot of roots in theater. In Nauvoo, Brigham Young played the high priest Pizarro. There was a theater in Nauvoo. So my experience with the theater did not feel to me like any rebellious kind of thing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:31:24] And it was. Well, it was after I was married. But let's bring that little piece into here now. There were a lot of Mormon artists who were very much on fire about creating Mormon art. And this is really the first thing that brought Gerald and me together. He was passionate about wanting to create Mormon art, wanting to preach the gospel through the arts, through the stage, in the movies. He had these huge ideas of what he was going to do. So we were part of a group that we called Art and Belief, where my dear beloved Trevor Southey, whom I adore, and others, Dennis Clark and Marvin Payne and various others came together to just inspire each other of how we were going to change the world through Mormon art.

Meeting Gerald and Their Courtship

John Dehlin [00:32:24] So give us a little background on Gerald before you talk about when you first met.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:32:34] Gerald was kind of an oddball in his family in that he had cultural appetites that his family didn't really understand. And he loved music and studied music and he was very devoted to the church. He went on a mission to Australia and had a tremendous vision of how he wanted to impact the world with his own writing and producing and all of this. He majored in drama.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:33:18] He was two and a half years younger than I was. He was in some plays and he loved the theater, loved the whole idea of art. And he and I met in a play. I had come back from my year abroad and I tried out for another play at BYU during the time that I was working as a writer at the Motion Picture Studio under, well, my dear friend Scott Whitaker. And Judge was. Judge Whitaker was in charge of the studio. And I tried out for the Skin of our Teeth that was being directed by Charles Metin Menton.

John Dehlin [00:34:11] Yeah, he was a professor of mine at byu.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:34:14] Well then there you go.

John Dehlin [00:34:15] Theater and film art analysis.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:34:17] Uh huh. So Dr. Man cast me as Mrs. Antrobus. Of course I wanted to be Sabina, the sexy one. But I never got to play the sexy one. I was always the matronly. Yeah. Or the strong one, you know, the more focused one.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:34:38] And Gerald was cast as the stage manager. The Thornton Wilder often had the stage manager as a character in the play, as in our Town. So here was this very charming, shining, blond young man who. Well, I'm sure you'll remember some of my words from Goodbye. I love you was like a fire to me. That. And I just wanted to be warmed by his fire.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:35:11] And he was much more charismatic and outgoing than I was. I was much more accomplished at that time than he was. But I was insecure somewhat in social kinds of ways and kind of withdrawn in some ways. So I really. I truly was just taken by him and his brightness and the way he spoke. And so that was the beginning.

John Dehlin [00:35:51] And you fell in love.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:35:54] Yeah, I did. And he sort of. Well, yes, I really fell for Gerald. And at the end of the play, it ended on a polka and then the curtains closed and as the curtain closed, Gerald and I would always just finish the polka together. It was just a fun thing that we did. And then he began to come over to visit me because he loved the way I thought. And now this should just make you laugh or whatever. I remember at one time he brought his notebook because he didn't want to miss any of the interesting things that we. That I had to say in our conversations.

John Dehlin [00:36:42] Wow, that's flattering.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:36:43] Oh yeah, well, of course. But that's not what I wanted. I wanted him to just fall in love with me and just all of the romantic, wonderful devotion. Sure. So we continued our ongoing relationship of just me being crazy about him and him being crazy about sort of what I was and what I represented to him and wanting to love me and truly falling in love with me as best as he could. And we.

John Dehlin [00:37:28] Did you have the romantic feelings for him?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:37:29] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:30] Sexually attracted to him. And were you ever like saying,

John Dehlin [00:37:36] you

John Dehlin [00:37:37] know, let's make some steam. Were you ever feeling.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:37:41] No. See, this is. I, as a woman am very. I have a lot of conflicting parts. To me, part of my womanness is very assertive about what needs to happen. And another part of me as a woman is very unable to sort of. I couldn't go out and chase a man. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. Now if anybody assigned me to, I wouldn't know how to do it.

John Dehlin [00:38:18] You were a lady in waiting.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:38:20] Yeah. So anyway, Gerald finally did start talking more seriously that he really would love to be able for him and me to be able to work things out. And anyway, we didn't have a long, long courtship, but we got engaged at Christmas and I went to Murray to meet his family. And his family loved me. And his family were good, very simple people. And so there we were, engaged. And I was really thrilled. I felt really good about it.

John Dehlin [00:39:10] Let me ask you a question.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:39:11] Uh huh.

John Dehlin [00:39:12] I asked Bruce Bashin this a couple weeks ago. He grew up, I think, in Idaho Falls. I asked him whether, growing up in the 60s, I think it was the 60s, 50s or 60s, whether he even knew the word homosexual. Like whether he even had sort of a. A framework for even contemplating that thing. Did you have that? And did you ever wonder about Gerald in those early courtship years?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:39:41] No. No. But I did have just a Bit of a concept. I remember in high school, I saw some boys teasing another boy saying they didn't use the word gay or whatever the worst words that are used now, but said, so and so, oh, he likes boys, doesn't he? And. And I really don't remember any of the steps toward my mentally being able to have a construct of what that meant, but I did sort of know, but just that it was, you know, something bad that some. Like, if you drink alcohol, it's a bad thing. If men were to be physical with each other, that's a bad thing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:40:24] All in the same kind of category. So when, not too long after our engagement, Gerald told me we had something that we needed to talk about, and he had been fasting. And so he came over to where I was living, and he told me that he had, in the past, had feelings and some experiences of a homosexual nature. And, you know, I knew what he was talking about. But now. This will be weird. I.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:41:04] I was sort of relieved that he had not had sex with a woman. That, to me, at that moment, that would have been worse because to me, that would have been a real sexual event. This other thing was just. It was bad, but it wasn't anything to really have a lot of concern about. Betrayed. Yeah. And Gerald was very determined and very honest. As he said to me, that's not who I really am. That's not who I want to be.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:41:39] I want to be with you. I want to have a family. I want to be in the church. I knew that was all very correct of his feelings. And so it wasn't a difficult thing for me to move forward with our engagement, because as far as I knew, this thing was just a mistake that people made sometimes. And in this case, you just find a good woman who loves you. And that was certainly me, and we would be fine.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:42:15] So we did continue, though not too long after that, Gerald disappeared. He broke the engagement. He just disappeared. He was terrified. And looking back, you know, I can understand why he did that, but I was devastated. I was truly heartbroken. Ooh. And you know what? I just remembered from that awful first week?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:42:43] I, with my friend Margi, went up to hear Rodney Turner speak at a BYU evening. I think it was an evening program at the Field House. And I went praying that I. And he was to be talking about women.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:43:03] And I went up humble and praying that I would receive something that would help me, because I thought, whatever's going on here, it's my fault. I'm not a woman enough for Gerald. And so I Sat there in the field house and heard Rodney Turner say these things that now I know to be so excruciatingly wrong and damaging.

John Dehlin [00:43:31] Who's Rodney Turner? Should I know who that. I'm sorry.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:43:34] I'm so glad you don't know. He was a BYU professor of religion, a very conservative guy, but sort of had this cult following. Or he was a. Somebody in the religion of, like, an

John Dehlin [00:43:50] early Bruce R. McConkie.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:43:51] Well, he wrote a book called Woman. Maybe it was just entitled Woman.

John Dehlin [00:43:57] Like a caveman Woman.

John Dehlin [00:44:01] Wait, Woman.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:44:05] Oh, no. He became known by those of us who did not see him as a friend, the person who represented the worst of patriarchy.

John Dehlin [00:44:16] What did he say in this talk? Just give us the flavor.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:44:22] He opened by saying, now I know that something like. I know that what I'm going to say might not sound quite right to you women, but this is the way it is. I mean, something like that. And then in his talk, he quoted this little thing for which he later became famous. I don't know if I can remember. I'm sure he didn't write this, but this awful, awful little verse that said, Women are doormats. The years those mats applaud. They keep their. Their men from. With muddy feet from going into God. Something like that. I mean, just unbelievable. Totally unbelievable. No, his book was entitled Woman and the Priesthood. And, you know, there's a sort of the beginnings of the woman's movement happening there. And Brother Turner, like other people, had been called to set things right.

John Dehlin [00:45:29] Sounds familiar.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:45:31] Yeah. Oh, and then my other memory of him. Wow. A few years later, there was a panel put together that was held on the University of Utah campus. I remember that Paul Toscana was on the panel. I was, and two other people were. And I'm sorry, I can't remember exactly who, but I gave my presentation a very intelligent present. Oh. Oh, excuse me. The title of this panel was How Shall We Worship God the Mother.

Marriage, Hidden Struggles, and Gerald's Sexuality

John Dehlin [00:46:17] Oh.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:46:17] Probably sponsored by the Mormon Women's Forum at that time, you know, was a pretty vibrant organization.

John Dehlin [00:46:25] This is later.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:46:27] Well, this would have been sometime in the 70s.

John Dehlin [00:46:31] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:46:31] All right.

John Dehlin [00:46:32] Not while you're a student at BYU.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:46:33] No.

John Dehlin [00:46:34] Okay, okay.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:46:36] But I remember after I finished and sat down, then Brother Turner took his turn. And honestly, I think his first statement was, and he had come from the south, so I remember his accent. Well, I guess you can worship anything you want to worship. You can worship the Great Pumpkin if you want to. And then he said a few things that were kind of little personal, insulting to me that because, oh, and I think had goodbye love you come out. No, I don't. No, no, of course it had not. It had not. But he knew that I'd lost something. I'd lost my mother or whatever and that's why I needed a heavenly mother. I mean something absurd like that. But anyway.

John Dehlin [00:47:27] Armchair psychoanalyst.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:47:29] But that memory just came to me. So there you have that one.

John Dehlin [00:47:32] So Gerald had disappeared.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:47:35] Oh yeah. Back to my.

John Dehlin [00:47:37] Gave a talk.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:47:38] Yes, yes.

John Dehlin [00:47:39] And it made you feel.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:47:41] Oh, oh, listen, my friend Marge and I were sitting, I think right toward the front in the middle of his talk. I was crying so vehemently that I got up and ran out and stood underneath. I remember standing underneath the bleachers and my friend came with me because everything he was saying was hurting me so badly. I just couldn't stand it.

John Dehlin [00:48:12] Maybe making you feel like it was your fault that Gerald had disappeared, probably.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:48:17] But knowing that what he said was not that I knew there was something deeply wrong with what he was saying, but because I was in such a vulnerable position, everything just came at me like swords. So anyway, a number of months. Well, some few months later, Gerald called me and he said, could you ever forgive a blind man? Or something like that? And so he came over and we talked and I still felt that it was a correct thing that Gerald and I marry. And you see, we'll get to all of these things down the line. But I don't look back on that as I made a dreadful mistake. I really feel that somehow I bargained for the kind of experience that that was for me.

John Dehlin [00:49:29] Did you seek counsel? Should I marry a gay man to a leader or a parent?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:49:34] No.

John Dehlin [00:49:35] Didn't want to tell anyone about his past.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:49:40] I don't. Or were things just. I don't think I told anybody. I don't think I did.

John Dehlin [00:49:46] Like, you hear that John F. Kennedy had like mistresses all over the White House. And even when Gordon Romney's. When Mitt Romney's dad ran for president, no one talked about the Mormon thing. It seems like there was just this. You didn't talk about certain stuff back then. Is that part of why you wouldn't have.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:50:09] I don't feel that I had a need. I really felt comfortable about going into that marriage. And I really.

John Dehlin [00:50:19] Or intellectually or culturally,

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:50:24] I think in every way I just felt comfortable about doing this. I mean there was no. I mean who would I go to to say should I marry a gay man? I mean look, even today our general authorities often say so called gay back then being I Mean, there was no such thing as a gay man back then. Yeah, there was, you know, somebody who just made this mistake.

John Dehlin [00:50:53] Ah, gotcha. So some behavior. Yeah, some.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:51:01] Okay, so we did marry on.

John Dehlin [00:51:06] Were you ever like, you know, the traditional make out kissing?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:51:10] Oh, we did enough kissing and just necking. That. I mean, I loved that. And you see, we will, I'm sure, as we get further into all of this. Gerald was not bisexual, but he did not find me repulsive. Now, isn't that a good thing to know? Which is not the case for, you know, a lot of gay men. They would rather they throw up in any attempt to have a physical relationship with a woman.

John Dehlin [00:51:53] So one last question about this. As far as the stereotypes go of being effeminate or hands or mannerisms, did he have that back then?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:52:07] He didn't necessarily have some of the mannerisms that are really, really evident that we make fun of or that we observe. Now.

John Dehlin [00:52:22] He.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:52:27] He was animated in a way that more often than not, gay men are animated. That. That straight men, I mean, that's one of the attractive features of a lot of gay men. They're more animated. They're sort of like women in the way their faces can move and their hands can go and whatever. And so, yes, Gerald was that he wasn't a queenly kind of person.

John Dehlin [00:52:57] Did he talk in a feminine way or does none of this matter? I'm just trying to set the stage.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:53:07] No, he didn't have a deep, deep voice and he didn't have a reedy, big masculine build. But there was nothing necessarily about him besides being in the theater and loving music and being animated, which are risky, of course. Very risky.

John Dehlin [00:53:34] Very risky.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:53:34] Very risky. But they're also attractive.

John Dehlin [00:53:36] Wonderful.

John Dehlin [00:53:37] We're going to get to that.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:53:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:38] Okay. Okay. So you took him back and you believe that he was sincere in having made a mistake. You didn't ask him, what did you do during those months? Where were you?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:53:52] No.

John Dehlin [00:53:54] Were you with another man?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:54:01] We did talk enough that, I mean, he was not. I mean, he had. He did not repeat what he would have called his mistakes during that period, that time that we were apart. No, we talked about that. And so we married. Mary and D. Hanks married us. It was a wonderful ceremony and I felt we had a fine honeymoon and I could not get into Gerald's brain. But I'm sure it was working the way a gay man's brain works to make sense of having a physical relationship with a woman.

John Dehlin [00:54:41] So it was a natural honeymoon. No big problem or drama or hesitance.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:54:48] No, but very early on, at least a couple of months into it, and I probably tell this somewhere in goodbye, love you. Gerald just knew that what he'd been hoping for had not happened.

John Dehlin [00:55:09] And what was that talk about what he had talked to the bishop about before he got married?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:55:19] Do you know, I am having a hard time remembering exactly who Gerald had talked to at what point.

John Dehlin [00:55:27] Sure.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:55:27] But I know he had talked to various people. Who, of course, just, you know, encouraged him that, you know, you just get over this and you get a good woman. Now, what was your question?

John Dehlin [00:55:41] Yeah, just. Had he been encouraged that if he got married, had he talked to anyone about it?

John Dehlin [00:55:47] Oh, totally.

John Dehlin [00:55:47] Had he been encouraged that if he.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:55:48] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:55:50] A good woman one wedding night, you're fixed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:55:54] I don't know that it was put quite like that way, but. Okay, now here I want to. This little story. I want to be on here, and I might not ever remember to bring it in. At the same time that Gerald and I were engaged and courting one of his friends, in fact, one of his roommates who was gay, and I mention him in the book, I probably used a different name. I don't remember. He had been caught at BYU in some kind of thing that insisted that he go up to visit with Spencer W. Kimball, who was, I think, an apostle then and in charge of all the homosexuals in the church. That was his job. Hm.

John Dehlin [00:56:39] Interesting.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:56:39] That would keep you awake at night, wouldn't it, John? So this friend of ours went up there and then. Then he got engaged and they married, I think, just a little. Some short while after we did, they went up to visit with President Kimball together. And President Kimball. He wasn't president then, but I. Brother Kimball.

John Dehlin [00:57:04] Elder Kimball.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:57:05] Elder Kimball looked at, and I'm not going to use any names here, my friend's fiance, and said, if you are sufficiently faithful, sufficiently feminine, you can save this man. And I know that because she wrote me a letter after Goodbye, I love you came out and she. In the letter, she used that statement. And then to corroborate it, I sent an email to my friend and asked, is this pretty much what Elder Kimball said to you as you sat? He said, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:57:42] So he lumped it on the woman.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:57:45] Well, and of course, putting some. That this man had to shape up and fly right. But he did say to the woman that. And many years later and two children later, they divorced. So can you imagine the burden on that woman? I failed and I hope and believe that at this point. She does not believe that.

John Dehlin [00:58:11] Sure.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:58:12] But that's where we were at that point and I have talked to so many dozens of LDS men who in council with Elder Kimball and others were pretty much promised. My friend Trevor is pretty open about his journey and he. He had to or did consult with Elder Kimball, who pretty much laid out the plan that marriage is part of what's going to take. Give you the direction that you need on this. Oh, that was. Oh, yeah, yeah. And somewhere or other, Gerald. And I've heard other men say this was told you would be better off at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake with a millstone around your neck than being a homosexual. That's where we were at that time. Really difficult, sad place. And that's where a lot of people still are.

John Dehlin [00:59:21] So you said a couple months into it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:59:23] Yes, Gerald.

John Dehlin [00:59:23] I was disappointed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:59:24] Gerald. Well, I mean, he just gradually realized and he had this huge emotional life going on inside of him and he just knew that the things he had hoped for of this change in the way he operated inside had not happened. And I probably tell in there, he told me later he was listening to a radio broadcast and heard Matthew Arnold's poem. Some little while into the marriage, Gerald realized that what he had been hoping for, of a real change inside of the way that he was experiencing himself emotionally and sexually, that it would change. He realized that that was not going to happen. And I do write about it there in Goodbye, I Love youe, if you wanted to.

John Dehlin [01:00:29] Yep, absolutely. Maybe start around here and just kind of.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:00:33] And see. I haven't read this for a long time.

John Dehlin [01:00:36] Well, fortunately, last night I did and the night before, so.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:00:40] Whoa.

John Dehlin [01:00:40] Ah.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:00:41] Mm. On a Sunday morning, we were lazing in bed, waiting for the time to get ready for church. Gerald seemed in a pensive mood and didn't want to. He turned on the radio to listen, as he often did, to the Sunday morning poetry reading on ksl. The rich male voice introduced the next poem, the Buried Life by Matthew Arnold. I watched Gerald's face as he listened, absorbed.

The Buried Life and Discovering the Truth

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:01:07] Alas. Is even love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal to one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men concealed their thoughts for fear that if revealed, they would by other men be met with blank indifference or with blame reproved?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:01:29] I knew they lived and moved, tricked in disguises, alien to the rest of men and alien to themselves. And yet the same heart beats in every human breast. There were tears on Gerald's cheeks. Why were there tears on Gerald's cheeks?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:01:57] He took a long, loud breath and stared at the ceiling. But often in the world's most crowded streets. But often in the den of strife There rises an unspeakable desire. After the knowledge of our buried life. A thirst to spend our fire and restless force in tracking out our true original course.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:02:31] A longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beat so wild, so deep in us. To know whence our lives come and where they go. Gerald cried quietly and then gave himself over to great heaving sobs.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:02:51] I was paralyzed. What was this? Gerald was my rock. I couldn't have him shaking like this. I pulled him into my arms and pressed my cheek to his hair. He let me comfort him for a moment and then turned away.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:03:05] It's nothing, he said in a strange voice. It's just me. Just life. I took his hand and was quiet. No one can be strong all the time, I thought. Anything so bright as he would have to have a dark side.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:03:23] I'll just let it be and it will take care of itself. Gerald can handle anything. He'll be fine. We'll be fine. In a few minutes he'll turn over and look at me and smile. And then we'll get up and go to church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:03:39] Yeah. This. This thirst to spend our fire and restless force in tracking out our true original course. Yeah. Gerald was. Was unremitting in his hunger to know and to feel what to him was the reality of his soul.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:04:10] And to those who find it very easy to condemn and say, you can't even use the word soul like this. You know, this is just some dirty thing over here at the side. To Gerald, and I'm sure to many, if not most who are aware, their experience of who they are, that includes their homosexuality, is to them a very deep part of their soul in a way that we who are outside looking in don't understand.

John Dehlin [01:04:48] There's some notes in there that I wrote about how wonderful it would be from a woman's perspective to be married to a gay man. Here's a man.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:04:59] You're right.

John Dehlin [01:05:00] Here's a man who was a fabulous cook.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:03] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:05:04] He was the one helping you decorate the home.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:06] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:09] Your favorite game together was Name that Author or what was it?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:13] Oh, yeah. Authors. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:14] What was it called? Authors.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:15] There's authors. You know, card game authors.

John Dehlin [01:05:16] He's probably a fantastic listener.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:21] Oh, yes. Absolutely sensitive.

John Dehlin [01:05:25] The perfect best friend.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:27] Of course.

John Dehlin [01:05:29] Everything that a good female best friend would beat another female.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:33] Totally.

John Dehlin [01:05:34] Plus, he's your husband.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:35] Yeah. And gay men are good for absolutely everything except to be married to a heterosexual woman.

John Dehlin [01:05:45] Imagine how Good a bishop. How good a gay man would be as a bishop?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:05:49] There have been gay men who have been bishops. Well, yeah, our gay men. And you know, I speak mostly of our gay men and sometimes to letting. Not bringing in the lesbians the way that they need to be able to participate in this kind of conversation. Because my experience is been primarily not only with Gerald, but mostly with gay men as friends and the majority of those who have come into my life. But the qualities that they have are very desirable qualities, not in spite of, but because of the fact that they have this unusual emotional, sexual kind of experience that is built into them.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:06:38] And you see, many cultures acknowledge the richness that these unusual people can bring to them. And I mention in no More Goodbyes, having read that, you know, some indigenous cultures have a special name for them, a special place, an honored place for them as two spirit. Is that what I forget what I call call them there what I had read.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:07:07] But gay men would have an unusual richness that because in our Mormon culture now, we either throw them out, treat them in a way that they voluntarily leave, or demand that they behave like straight men. Our culture is enormously deprived of gifts that they would bring. Hey, do you think you can have a really good music program and not have gay men involved in it? Not on your life or theater.

John Dehlin [01:07:51] I have no business sharing a story, but I'm going to share a very brief story. A couple weeks ago, when I interviewed Bruce Bastian, I said, if I could give you a pillow or fix you, or if some young man wanted to be fixed, shouldn't we invest in research to help that man get fixed? If there could be a way to splice into the DNA and fix that gay gene, if there's a gay gene. And of course, that's when he got most angry, in the whole time that we were talking together. But his comment was, I don't want to be fixed. I don't need to be fixed.

John Dehlin [01:08:22] All the wonderful things I've been able to do to create this marvelous company that employed 7,000 people, people brought in half a billion dollars a year was in part because of who I was. And part of who I was was this gay thing. And I'm like, I'm not sure I quite bought it, Bruce. You know, I didn't say that. But like, in my mind I'm thinking, I don't know. I was having lunch with a very good friend last week.

John Dehlin [01:08:44] He told me the story about how in Russia they breed foxes because foxes have beautiful fur and it gets cold in Russia. And there are a lot of good uses for beautiful fox fur. But it turns out that foxes are incredibly nasty creatures, mean and vicious.

John Dehlin [01:09:06] And so they said, well, we've been doing genetics for a long time. Let's just naturally select the nice foxes, and we'll slowly breed this dynamic out of them. So they bred the foxes and bred the foxes, and they bred the foxes towards a certain area where they wanted to go. And two things happened. Number one is they came to look a lot like dogs. Just like dogs.

John Dehlin [01:09:36] Wow.

John Dehlin [01:09:37] And guess what the second thing was?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:09:38] Uh. Oh, what?

John Dehlin [01:09:40] Their fur was no longer beautiful.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:09:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:44] And so genetically altering them in a way that you think you're wiser in a direction that you think is wiser took away the beauty. Sorry. Forgive me for that.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:09:56] No, no. I know that pertains here, absolutely. John. I understand. I think that often we think we are so much smarter than nature and that we can modify nature to the way that we think it really ought to be. And sometimes, frequently, we make such errors. We're modifying our food. We're changing the whole face of the planet in ways that are clearly so incorrect. And I think that with the human being and with this subject that we're speaking of, to look at those among us who are of homosexual orientation and say, oh, boy, I gotta fix that. How do we know there may be some wisdom in nature? Because this evidences in everywhere in nature, hundreds and hundreds of species evidence. This and what gay people can bring to the table are unusual gifts that I think we ought not to tamper with, but appreciate.

John Dehlin [01:11:25] And that made Gerald, in some ways, a very delightful husband.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:11:29] Gerald was a very delightful human being and a good husband and a fun, fun father. You know, later on, there were all kinds of difficult things thrown into the mix that were very challenging for my children. And Gerald made unwise choices in a lot of ways. But he was a very caring husband and father and really a fun father. My friend's kids were just so envious of them having such a. Who was there for them so, so often.

John Dehlin [01:12:06] And in addition to his love for art and music and theater, you got the sense that he was really wrestling intellectually with everything.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:12:18] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin [01:12:18] Like, one of the things that really stood out in the book is how he was almost seemingly trying to construct a theology.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:12:26] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:26] That would be compatible with. With who he was.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:12:29] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:12:31] Do you remember that?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:12:32] Oh, well, forever. That was part of his ongoing struggle. Forever knowing that who he was, his homosexual orientation was so at odds with everything he saw out here. Certainly in the church that He. He read and just studied everything he could come upon. And in the 70s, you know, when the, quote, New Age burst upon us, Gerald was among the first to grab these tools of meditation and learning about Eastern ways of looking at things and trying to. Trying to figure out who he was. Oh, yeah. Gerald was voracious

John Dehlin [01:13:22] and as he was. There are a couple. Can I grab the book back?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:13:26] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:13:26] There are a couple points in the book where he's coming to you with poems or with scriptures or with theological ideas where he's clearly, as I read it, communicating to you, I'm still gay, but there's got to be a theology that brings us together. And he'll lay it. He'll kind of gently, you're in bed together, whatever. He'll lay it to you and say, here's how I'm seeing it. Maybe it's not just man and woman, but maybe it's something even more expansive.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:14:05] Yes. And anytime any of those little windows would be opened, I would shut them really, really fast. I mean, if I would shut the polygamy window really fast, I'm certainly going to shut every other odd window fast really, really rapidly.

John Dehlin [01:14:19] Which is strange for someone who also considers herself progressive. You were also very traditional in some ways.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:14:28] Oh, yes. And you know, the thing of open Marriage was that book called Open marriage in the 70s, and there were all these experiments of whatever. I never, ever had any. There was nothing in me that could validate anything but an exclusive, committed relationship.

John Dehlin [01:14:53] Sure.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:14:55] Ever.

John Dehlin [01:14:56] Yeah. And did you. You know, one of the things that fascinates me is when things happen in the undercurrent of a couple of a marital relationship, and they're just not discussed and they're not contemplated. And so I am clearly seeing a man trying to say, carolyn, I'm still gay. This hasn't gone away.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:15:19] Right.

John Dehlin [01:15:20] And of course, I've got to make it right.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:15:21] Of course. And I was writing all that after the fact, along the way, as I saw anything that would remind me of what might still be in Gerald. A little moment of terror would make it so horrific.

John Dehlin [01:15:39] You talk about a chill. You mention a chill a lot. A feeling of.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:15:43] Yeah, well, you know, when there's something threatening that comes from any direction, there's something in your stomach that lets you know, ooh, whatever this is, you gotta handle it or it's coming. So, yes, there was a lot. And when Gerald made me read D.H. lawrence, what Women in Love is that, I'm sure that that's mentioned in there that talks about the intense physical relation And I don't even know that was specifically sexual relationship, but these two men who gave each other something that a woman could not.

John Dehlin [01:16:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:30] I want to turn quickly. We would be remiss, before we jump into more of Gerald's story, to not talk about how he helped you make yours.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:16:41] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:41] And there's a poem that I want you to read as a way to introduce his support for the book Beginnings, that he helped you first publish your first book.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:16:54] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:56] Would you mind reading a little bit

John Dehlin [01:16:59] from

John Dehlin [01:17:01] that poem or.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:17:03] Well, sure. This is the title poem. May I just say how the book happened and then read this. As I have confessed to you, I was always writing these little poems to put in my poetry. Very bad. Poor if you're not quite. Quite so bad.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:17:21] I just kept writing. And so as Gerald and I, prior and then as we were married, shared these poems that I had written, he was so excited. He was so enthusiastic, bless him. I mean, that's what he called me all the way through.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:17:45] We've got to publish these. I mean, what crazy person but a gay man would come up with the idea of publishing his wife's poetry? But it was soon after our marriage that he got very serious. We've got it. And I thought, well, I thought I'd publish them posthumously or send them into the church magazines or whatever, but Gerald was insistent that we put together a manuscript.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:18:15] And so I did. And he got Trevor Southey. And he had become friends with Trevor before I did. He got Trevor to do these illustrations. And we got in the car one day and took it up to Salt Lake City to see who'd be first in line to publish this book of my poems.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:18:42] And we went to Marvin Wallen at Bookcraft, who sat just down in his office and he didn't even look at anything. He said, you know, look, poetry is just not going to sell. And I think Gerald showed him one of Trevor's illustrations. Oh, that's very depressing.

John Dehlin [01:19:01] There was a Shakespeare quote that I liked. If Shakespeare himself came out with a poetry book. Oh, didn't you write that?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:19:09] If that's what I. I don't remember everything now, but if that's in there. It was said if Shakespeare came out

John Dehlin [01:19:15] with the book himself, we wouldn't publish it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:19:18] Well, yeah. And I said, why don't you just take the manuscript and let your wife read it? No, no, no, no. He didn't want to. So we went home and I would. To my mind it was done. And Gerald said, I can be a publisher.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:19:33] Anybody can be a Publisher. So that's what happened. Gerald did all the footwork, and we went to Mountain State's bindery and had 2,000. Well, we borrowed money from the credit union. I was at that time, we're still working for the motion picture studio. And we borrowed $2,000 from the credit union, had 2,000 copies of this little book printed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:20:02] And I remember when they were delivered, we had all these packages, and we put them in the closet and in my daddy's garage and under the bed. And, you know, it was really an outrageous thing. And I'm sure I thought, I've got a whole lifetime of wedding presents that I have.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:20:26] And we went up to BYU bookstore. First of all. Well, I remember Gerald saying that somebody at the binder. Now, see, keep in mind that I understand full well that what happened with Beginnings was a fluke. It was a fluke. It was maybe if I did have any kind of fate or path that I and the angels were developing for some work that I might have to do, that was what opened the door. I am fully aware that the fact that Beginnings sprang upon the Mormon community in 67 and was such an unusual hit, that was a strange thing. That was a fluke. It surprised me as much as anybody else.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:21:13] But Gerald told me when he picked up the books from the bindery, the man at the bindery said something like, boy, we've had a hard time with this book. The people just keep sitting there and reading it and telling each other to look at this poem and that poem.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:21:29] And then. So we took the book up to BYU bookstore. And the buyer there said, well, you know, poetry won't sell, but since you're a local person, why don't you leave? What did she say, five or something on consignment? And Gerald said, well, they come in packages of 20, so leave a package on consignment. We'll keep. Come back and get the rest.

John Dehlin [01:21:49] And it was that person who made the Shakespeare quilt. It was that person, was it? Yeah.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:21:53] Okay. So she put. Took a package and put up a display. And either the next day or the day after that, she called and said, you know that book that you left up here? Do you have any more of those?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:22:13] So we took up more. We went to the 70s bookstore and then pretty soon to Deseret Bookstore. And just like immediately, everybody was buying this book. And there were. Early on, I know there were months where Deseret Book routinely ordered about 500 copies a month.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:22:37] And we sold about 20,000 copies of that before we did even the slightest amount of advertising. I mean, it really was weird. And I understand that it was a weird, fluky thing. It was. It had Mormon thought in it, but it wasn't necessarily only specifically Mormon, but it spoke to Mormon people and especially Mormon women. But, you know, a lot of men, too, were really appreciating it, and so that's just what happened.

John Dehlin [01:23:12] So read us a little bit of it, if you don't mind.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:23:15] Yeah, okay.

John Dehlin [01:23:17] Set this one up. Because if people are slow like me, they'll appreciate knowing what the poem's gonna be about before they hear it, so they can savor the words in the context and not have to read it the second time. So what's this one about?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:23:33] This one is about eternal growth. And the illustration for this poem is the one. I don't have that original book with me. White book, red letters, Beginnings. And Trevor's beautiful illustration there, called God in embryo of an adult male in embryo position. And so this is the title poem, Beginnings. Today you came running with a small specked egg warm in your hand, you could barely understand. I know as I told you of beginnings of egg and bird told too, that years ago you began smaller than sight. And then as egg yearns for sky and seed stretches to tree, you became like me. Oh, but there's so much more. You and I, child, have just begun. Think worlds from now. What might we be? We who are seed of deity. So these little verses just spoke to a lot of people.

John Dehlin [01:25:00] It's a very Mormon poem right there. It's sort of touching on some of the most expansive. Probably the most expansive Mormon doctrine.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:25:09] Right? Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:10] Of theosis.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:25:11] Yeah. This is true. And I still don't know why this little book became so popular. Beginnings sold well over 150,000 copies. But it spoke to people in a way that hadn't. And I don't fool myself that I know these are not museum quality poems that a century from now will be looked at as whatever, but my poems have been very useful for people, and that's a word that I like. My stuff has been very, very useful. And there's some poems that are pretty good poems. BYU Professor Clinton Larsen was known to say, carolyn Pearson has put Mormon art back 50 years. But nevertheless.

John Dehlin [01:26:07] Oh, in a bad way.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:26:08] Oh, in a bad way.

John Dehlin [01:26:09] Oh.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:26:10] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:11] Put it back.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:26:12] Oh, yeah. Because people accepted these simple little verses as what poetry really is.

John Dehlin [01:26:19] Oh.

John Dehlin [01:26:19] Because he's sophisticated.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:26:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:21] Oh, yes.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:26:23] Yeah. However, let me add that later on, when the Order is Love came out, he called and told me what an absolutely wonderful play that Was so I don't want to say anything bad about it, but he was upset that my poems became very popular. But this was just. Honestly, this was an odd thing how this happened and this opened the door to everything else.

John Dehlin [01:26:48] You know, I just have to ask, and I'm condemning myself here. How many Mormon men, then or now, would believe so much in a creative work of their wife.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:27:02] Oh, no.

John Dehlin [01:27:03] That they would sacrifice treasure and time to make sure after rejection and rejection to make sure that their wives creative work sees the light of day? This is a miracle.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:27:19] Only a dear queer man like I had. No, listen, John, really, I believe. I don't know that I believe in predestination. I don't think that everything has to be worked out here, but I am absolutely willing to say some of these things. We were being guided to let this happen and this happen and this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:27:50] And so what it has turned out, you know, for me is the privilege of being able to have a real deep connection and hopefully positive impact on a lot of people. And you see, later on, when these poems were the first thing I did, and then I did some women's books, we'll talk about that. But when Gerald and I were in the midst of our worst struggling, and we never talked about the idea that I would ever write our story, even when everything was out between us and we were dealing with the worst of everything.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:28:32] But he said, blossom, you know, that you were not intended just to write simple little poems. You know, that that was setting the foundation for you to do something much, much, much more important.

John Dehlin [01:28:49] What's it like to have someone believe in you that much?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:28:52] It's really nice.

John Dehlin [01:28:55] And we should have started by saying he called you Blossom.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:28:58] Yes. And my tongue wouldn't quite. Didn't want to say that because it would sound weird to people, but I don't remember him ever calling me Carolyn. I mean, I was named Magnolia Blossom Jones by my dear bad boy boyfriend at byu, Larry, who gave me the name of Magnolia Blossom Jones, and he was Jezbo Jones. And we had this fun, fun thing somehow. Gerald, a lot of my friends, she'll call me Magnolia. A lot of my friends, they'll call me Blossom. Gerald called me Blossom all the time.

Creative Career During the Marriage Years

John Dehlin [01:29:33] So just to kind of build up to talking about the complications in the marriage, let's just quickly tell our viewers, listeners, a few more of the major creative works that you would have been involved in, you know, early on or. Yeah. Throughout those years. So beginnings built into.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:29:57] Yes. And then I did a second book of poems called the Search Another called the Growing Season, called A Widening View. During that period of time, Doubleday took over Beginnings and the Search for a little period of time. And then Marv Wallin called us on the phone one day from Bookcraft and said, is that the book of poems that I turned down a long time ago? And we said, yes, Brother Wallen. Boy, boy, boy, did I make a mistake there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:30:30] So. And see, Gerald had become a publisher and put out. And he put out a book of his own called There Is a Way Back about his work and others with the Mormon hippie drug kids in Utah during the 70s and various things like that. But we thought it might be wise to turn over the poems to book craft.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:31:01] So we did. And then I started writing some of my books about feminism or about Mormon women, the first one being Daughters of Light, which I think Gerald and I first published and then turned over to Bookcraft, a compilation of stories of the early Mormon women exercising spiritual gifts, which I must pause to tell you. When I first discovered the history of Mormon women, when my dear friend Leonard Arrington, church historian, led us into knowledge of Women's exponent and some of the things that early Mormon women had done, and I went to the library and read these wonderful old copies of Women's Exponential and read about these strong, brilliant Mormon women, I was delighted and I was outraged.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:32:03] I was so thrilled to find these women. And I was outraged that nobody had ever told me about the women in Mormon history before.

John Dehlin [01:32:11] What were some things women did back in the 19th century that would surprise us today? Well, anything come to mind?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:32:18] Sure, that they. Well, we know the Brigham Young sent many of them away to become doctors. Mormon women were lawyers at a time when that just was not ever done. Women were. The early Mormon women were friends to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and participated in that whole wave of the suffrage movement. So I don't think we understand that.

John Dehlin [01:32:46] How about in terms of ordinances or things that we consider to be ordinances?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:32:51] Yes. The early Mormon women, as we know, and some of the stories that I gather that I put in Daughters of Light, Joseph Smith encouraged the women to lay on hands, to anoint with oil to.

John Dehlin [01:33:07] To heal the sick, right?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:33:08] Yeah. To heal the sick, to the gift of tongues was known then really pretty much very much as a woman's gift, the gift of prophecy. There are so many stories that really would surprise us.

John Dehlin [01:33:29] How about washings and anointings?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:33:30] Oh, yeah. And it was clear through much of the early period in Utah, it was routine that before a woman went into Labor. She was given a washing and an anointing and a blessing by the Relief Society sisters.

John Dehlin [01:33:49] Just like kind of similar to the temple ceremony. Oil was involved, right? Different parts of the body were anointed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:33:57] I believe that's true.

John Dehlin [01:33:59] With a prayer and oil.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:34:02] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:03] Part by part, yes.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:34:06] Women were. There were a lot of doors opened for women spiritually by Joseph Smith. And then the polygamy thing got all weird and messed up and shut a lot of those doors and put women in their place. And then, you know, the 19th century came along, and a lot of fear developed, and then we had to make things correlated. And as the years went on, women lost more and more and more of their autonomy in terms of spiritual gifts, in terms of Relief Society being able to chart their own course in any kind of way. Today, Relief Society women don't even write their own visiting teaching lessons. At the top, there are a lot of awful stories we're not going to talk about.

John Dehlin [01:35:00] So you wrote some books on some of these things.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:35:04] Daughters of Light showed the spiritual gifts that women were involved in. And then I wrote a book called the Flight and the Nest that looked at what those early women were doing professionally, politically, educationally. And it was all new stuff that we. We didn't know all that was going on. And so those were important books. Some of the first things that were published as modern Mormon women were rediscovering their past. These were two important things. So.

John Dehlin [01:35:49] And Gerald was supportive?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:35:51] Oh, yes, totally.

John Dehlin [01:35:53] Did he have a job throughout all this?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:35:58] Gerald was an entrepreneur, and the money that supported our family essentially came from the books of mine that we published. And he handled that and was into a lot of his own projects and ideas that didn't really take hold. Gerald was a dreamer, but he also was a doer. You know, he made beginnings happen, and he had a lot of his own things that he hoped to. His dreams that he wanted to bring to fruition. That didn't ever happen.

John Dehlin [01:36:43] So before we jump back into

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:36:47] more

John Dehlin [01:36:47] of the complexity, I have one last observation. I have this impression that there was this time where literature and the arts were more heavily valued than maybe they are today. I've been told about something like out of the best books or some type of series of books that, like even Relief Society women were encouraged to read the classics, to read and discuss the classics.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:37:18] John, you are so young.

John Dehlin [01:37:21] Tell us about. Cause I'm trying to think about a poetry book in Mormonism selling 150,000 copies in 2010. No way.

John Dehlin [01:37:31] No way.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:37:32] Oh, of course.

John Dehlin [01:37:33] And just no, no.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:37:35] A lot of who knows what the time dictates. Certain or people's inner needs dictate what happens in a given time. And you're right that I think in Mormondom, there has been a time where there was what, More richness in certain ways.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:38:09] Now, wait, I'm not sure I want to say that. I have to acknowledge that I'm not really up to date about contemporary Mormon art. There's an awful lot going on that's being published. Good novels, good poetry, a variety of things that I know are of very good quality that would perhaps, as art, compare more favorably with a high standard of art than what was going on back where we're talking about.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:38:42] But there was, yes, I think, an openness and a kind of a richness to what art might mean for us institutionally. And because you mentioned, you said it was such a thing as out of the best books. Listen, I, and so many women that I know yearn, we look back with great fondness on those days when Relief Society actually acknowledged that women were women and had their own ideas, could speak to each other in a way that was not always dictated by men.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:39:30] Out of the best books was a series of books that were beautiful. Lessons were created by taking samples of literature from everywhere, some Mormon stuff, if it happened to fit. Bruce Clark put several of my poems into one of those lessons when the Beginnings came out. But primarily it was literature from all over the world, from all times, developing themes of whatever, of honesty, of integrity, of virtue, of whatever it was that the theme of the lesson was, was enriched. Enriched by the literature of everywhere. And then we had, of course, the cultural refinement lesson where we learned.

John Dehlin [01:40:22] What would you do with these lessons? Was this Relief Society.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:40:25] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:25] So your Relief Society curriculum absolutely was exploring the classics. It was like a book club. It was like a book club with the early Society sisters.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:40:33] Right. With a good theme to each lesson that was very consistent with whatever the gospel is supposed to be all about. That's what out of the best books come.

John Dehlin [01:40:42] And was it as marvelous as it seems like it might be?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:40:44] It was. It was wonderful. I think I probably have all of those. There were at least four years that I remember, maybe more, where the text was this nice hardbound book called out of the Best Books, Volume one, two,

John Dehlin [01:40:56] three, four, whatever, Dickens and every.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:40:59] Oh, absolutely everything. It was great. And I think the institutional personality of the church, as I remember it has to some extent had personality correlated right out of it. So that today the priesthood and the Relief Society both share the Same manual. And as I wrote into the correlation committee, I think about a year and a half ago, whenever we started that looking at the manual now that the priesthood and the Relief Society share puts me in mind of the old English law that said, when two marry and become one, the one is he. So now that Relief Society and the priesthood are one, the one is he. Meaning that there is no real attempt to acknowledge that women are speaking to each other or being spoken to. The language is still all male. A lot of female richness has just been taken right out of much of the experience.

John Dehlin [01:42:18] It's a totally different culture now as it relates to literature and the arts.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:42:22] Yeah. And theater, which was really such an integral part of the kids growing up in Mormondom, the road shows. And really, in one of the texts that we had when I was a theater student at byu, said in the book, the most successful widespread little theater movement in the country is the LDS Church. And that was true. At that time, everybody did plays.

John Dehlin [01:42:57] The cultural hall was a cultural hall.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:43:02] And even those silly little roadshows were wonderful in what they did in bringing together people to be in the spotlight, to create their own silly thing or whatever and do the costuming and the makeup and travel around from here to there. That was wonderful.

John Dehlin [01:43:20] And stakes would put on musicals and plays, and you'd go to the stakes

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:43:25] center and every once in a while. Happens now, but it's rare. It is really, really rare. What, maybe five years ago, maybe more, the Sacramento Stake invited me to come see my play, the Order is Love, which Lex Diazevedo and I did.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:43:43] Story of the Mormons living in the United Order. It's really a good play. And I went to see their performance just because I thought I should. But I sat there having the best time, and I saw Mormonism on every one of its really excellent layers of the portrayal of the community that the United Order insisted upon, where everybody was part of the community in a really important way that they were taken care of and they gave what they could.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:44:21] Seeing all that acted out along with the community of the theater, bringing the people from all over the Stake into their own little theatrical United Order to give what they had to give. And I was told that the director, everybody who tried out was given something to do in the play. Not one person was said they couldn't participate. And they had some people who had some limitations that were a little bit evident. But it was a thrilling thing to me to see those people with their limitations having a place to be and see that's if there's one thing that is the brilliance of the Mormon idea.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:45:05] It's this community that when it happens, well, it happens really, really well. And then, as will I'm sure we'll get into. If you don't really belong to that community, it can be horrid. But so occasionally a stake will do a musical, but it's not like it used to be.

John Dehlin [01:45:30] And I should add that you penned My Turn on Earth.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:45:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:45:34] Was that the first sort of mainstream hit Mormon musical?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:45:40] The Order Is Love was the first kind of contemporary Mormon musical that gathered much attention. Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:45:49] Okay.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:45:52] And that was just about the time that Gerald and I and our four children moved from Provo to Walnut Creek, and Lex and I. And Lex came knocking on my door saying, I want to put some of your poems to music. But that didn't ever really happen. But what happened was that I had written this play in my late 20s is when I wrote that play. And Leonard Arrington helped me with some of the historical stuff. It's a really good play.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:46:24] And it was given a premiere at BYU Arts Festival. Lauren Wheelwright was in charge of. Was the Dean Thin. And so that was kind of a big deal. But Lex and I did do My Turn on Earth, which was an unusual hit, and it's a really good little story.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:46:55] And at that time, we could kind of do some advertising within the Mormon Network. And Lex put together a touring company of that that went through the. Well, I know Arizona and Nevada and Utah and California at least, and it was very successful. And the word was out.

The Marriage Unravels and Gerald Leaves

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:47:23] And that gave me, that year, enough money to put a down payment on a house. That was happening just at the time that Gerald and I were about to decide that the marriage was no longer sustainable. So that was My Turn on Earth. And it still is being done occasionally, not nearly as much as it was because of the same thing that I mentioned. There's so much going on. Well, in the culture. There's so much going on for kids anyway. Nobody has time left over. And then the things that are demanded of the church that are, you know, just specifically have to be done. Church things doesn't leave much time for fun stuff like putting on a play.

John Dehlin [01:48:03] My family loves that musical, My Turn On It.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:48:05] It's good.

John Dehlin [01:48:06] Yeah, it is. So let's turn back to Gerald a little bit.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:48:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:48:14] So he's supporting you in your career, trying to do his own creative endeavors as well. Some point was trying to build this theology that would accommodate him. But at some point, he develops, I don't know. I guess There's a poem I want you to read again. There's a point where he turns to you and talks to you about a Walt Whitman poem about breaking free. And I thought maybe you could read.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:48:49] Sure. And, you know, my memory doesn't immediately.

John Dehlin [01:48:53] I think you'll remember this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:49:01] I was grateful that Gerald had so much to give. And only occasionally did his generous spirit trouble me. Only occasionally did the storms that sometimes heaved within him cause me concern. Now and then I glimpsed something behind the light in his eyes that I did not understand.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:49:18] One night before going to sleep, he read aloud, passionately, a poem by Walt Whitman. Halfway through, I felt that strange chill in my stomach. Why was his voice so excited? Oh, to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last to be absolved from previous ties and conventions, to escape utterly from others anchors and holes, to drive from free to love, free to dash reckless and dangerous, to court destruction with taunts, with invitations, to ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me, to rise thither with my in inebriate soul, to be lost if it must be so, to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom, with one brief hour of madness and joy. Isn't that incredible? Gerald leaned back and closed his eyes.

John Dehlin [01:50:23] And I bet you were terrified.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:50:25] Oh, yes. Anything that spoke to me of his huge spirit going in a direction that I knew did not include me. And probably about this time he was becoming inactive in the church, not wearing his garments, things like that. All of which sent this huge terror through me. So, yeah, it was a scary time for me. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:58] And it seems like during this time he's trying to explore with you the idea of maybe an open marriage or having. And I don't know that you ever said that explicitly, but

John Dehlin [01:51:10] I had a

John Dehlin [01:51:11] friend come to me a couple years ago and tell me that his wife was gay, was lesbian, but that they were going to try and make it work, and that he was going to allow her to have relationships, but she would still be intimate with him and that somehow they would find a way to stay together but let her be who she needed to be and explore.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:51:35] Right.

John Dehlin [01:51:36] And it almost sounded like he was trying at some point to see if you might be flexible.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:51:43] I'm sure that's true. We didn't have an exact conversation like this early on, but a couple of years later, as we had moved to Walnut Creek and everything was just truly looking like we could not salvage a marriage, Gerald truly was clearly wishing and talking to me about the Idea that. Almost like my old seminary teacher had said, when, if we are worthy enough and it advanced enough, we will understand polygamy. Gerald was saying to me a similar kind of thing, that if I was sufficiently understanding and loved him enough and could see the whole picture, I might be able to participate in a relationship where he could have this other life and me too. And I never got even close to believing that I could do it or that it was a correct thing. Never.

John Dehlin [01:52:58] And you get the sense that around this time or later, he might have been involved in some private relationships you weren't aware about.

John Dehlin [01:53:06] Is that.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:53:08] Well, only when it exploded and somebody came and told me, okay, yeah, and let's.

John Dehlin [01:53:15] That was a very powerful part of the book for me. So there's this point in the book where a mutual friend comes to your door and has some news to deliver to you.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:53:30] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:31] Do you remember?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:53:32] Well, that was the end of my life. That was the end of life as I knew it.

John Dehlin [01:53:36] What happened?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:53:39] Well, there was this young woman who was one of the many that Gerald and I had befriended of trouble young kids. And she told me that she had something she had to tell me. And she was kind of shaking.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:53:52] I don't want to even tell you this, but you need to know that she had seen Gerald up at the gay bar in Salt Lake, the Sun, and had a conversation with him. And the implication was that, yes, he had been hoping to change, but he has never been able to. To change.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:54:13] And my life just ended. Everything. Everything fell on the floor. I was in absolute broken, devastated pieces. Gerald was away at that time going to a seminar, spiritual seminar of some kind in San Francisco. And I remember I walked down the stairs to his office and I called him on the phone and got him. And I asked him, I said, gerald, I don't know quite how I put it. What?

John Dehlin [01:54:53] Gerald, since you and I have been married, have there been any men?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:54:56] Yeah. And so he said, yes. And he. And then I said, what do you want to do? Do you want. Is this marriage over? Or whatever? And how could you think that? I never. I can't imagine not being with you and the family.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:55:20] And then we just agreed to talk about it when he came back. And then maybe four days. I had four days to be alone with my children. And if I remember correctly, I had a speaking engagement at BYU the next day.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:55:36] After, not sleeping, I had to go speak about something about women, to women. I, this hypocrite whose life was in shambles, was up there talking to women about whatever I was Talking to them about a friend who was.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:55:55] Who came in to help us with the kids during that time. She remembers. Well, she says that I. That during those days, I didn't open the curtains once, and I just did what I had to do to get to the day.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:56:09] And then Gerald came home, and he. And I went into the back bedroom, and I hugged him, and he hugged me. And we just cried and cried. And then we just, you know, started trying to figure out what can we do.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:56:27] And it took two years in Provo and then a move to. And I was. We had to sell our house in Walnut Creek for various reasons, business stuff. And it was I who said, look, as long as we are moving, let's move. Let's really move.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:56:45] Let's move to California. Gerald never dreamed that I would actually say, let's move out of Utah. And one of the reasons. Well, there were several. I wanted a new look at the world, but I thought that very likely we would be ending the marriage. And I didn't want to. You know, I was still. I was something of a public person in Utah, and I did not want to play out in front of the whole community a divorce and them knowing about Gerald, because I knew what the only understanding of this difficult subject was just 100% condemnation. And I didn't want that for either one of us to have to play out whatever we were going to play out in Utah.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:57:35] So we moved to Walnut Creek, and then for two additional years, struggled and struggled to find a way to save the marriage. And then it just became clear that. That we could not. And we divorced in 78 and committed to remain good friends, which we were able to do.

John Dehlin [01:58:05] You talk about how when Gerald. When you found out about Gerald, your father was dying, and you mentioned envying him.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:58:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:58:18] Mm.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:58:19] Oh.

John Dehlin [01:58:20] You said, I was envious of my father as he was dying. He was going to die soon.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:58:26] Yeah. And I mention in no more goodbyes, I have never, ever considered suicide. Nobody ever need worry about that for me. But there have been at least three points in my life where I wanted everything to end. All being, to cease.

John Dehlin [01:58:53] You made a really interesting point in here, and I'm going to just read from it. If my house had been destroyed by fire, if my child had been run over, I could call on the church. The church would be. The church would be wonderful, but not this. I could not bear it. Gerald might be excommunicated, and I would be humiliated and pitied. And then you also talk about a little later on when some ladies from the relief Society came to visit you and they asked you how you're doing and you said, we're fine. We're all fine.

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:59:32] Oh, yeah, we say that.

John Dehlin [01:59:33] And then you ask that question. Did every woman in the ward who had a real heartbreak lie about it like I was lying? Did we need so badly to look as bright and happy as the perfect family on the front of the ensign that we smiled no matter what the cost?

Carol Lynn Pearson [01:59:51] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:59:54] I guess you didn't end the book this way. And we'll talk about the ending in a little while. But you didn't end with this theme that the church wasn't there for you. But it's clear that there were some ways in which the church just could not be there for you. It can't be there for other people.

Gerald in San Francisco During the AIDS Crisis

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:00:11] Right. In terms of dealing with the issue, the church was not a resource for me. Not at all. But then, and I will be happy to talk about, you know, at the very end, that's where Mormons come through when there's physical stuff to be done. And often they can put away their judgment and say, I don't get it, but Sister Pearson needs us.

John Dehlin [02:00:35] Then they come through.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:00:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:00:49] So there's a point in San Francisco when Gerald brings you a man that you call Sam who tells you about what he had gone through at byu. Can you talk about that meeting with Sam? And I've got some quotes if you. I don't quite remember.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:01:08] Sure. I think I had met him early in Provo, but what you're speaking of, we saw him again later on. This was after he. Well, he had been beaten up by. He had been gay bashing. He had lost an eye. And I did know his story. He had told me his story of. He's one who went through shock therapy at byu.

John Dehlin [02:01:40] Talk about that for a bit for those who don't know.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:01:45] Well, one of the supposed remedies for homosexuality, and this was certainly not just in the Mormon community, this was nationally something that certain kinds of psychiatrists or whatever felt would be a useful thing of reprogramming one's sexuality by giving, by associating pain with the unwanted and pleasure with the wanted so that these men would voluntarily go, these Mormon men.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:02:26] And I'm. I know the women have similar kinds of heartbreaks, but it's the men whose stories I know on this particular thing, Mormon men would just about do anything, anything to not be gay. And so at that time and at byu, there were psychologists or whatever system was there to use shock therapy, which in this case was putting electrodes On a man's body, on his penis, on whatever parts of his body that would.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:03:11] And then show him some pornographic kinds of pictures. And if there was any kind of arousal toward that that the body presented, he would receive shock and would be burned on his. Whatever part of his body was hooked up.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:03:31] And then he would be shown pictures of women in alluring and erotic pictures, and there would not be the shock. So many of these men went through that session after session after session until the burns on their body. But mostly it just destroyed their inner self. Their psyches were so broken, and everything that they. Everything they believed about themselves was just so damaged.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:04:10] And, of course, nobody was changed in their sexuality. Some people were made so that. That anything about sex was so revolting to them. And maybe those are the only success stories. So. Yes. And what did I call him in the book?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:04:34] Yes, he was one of those. And as I remember, he had done everything early on. He had used his own money to go to a therapist before he told his parents. I borrow some of these little bits of stories when I created Facing East. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:04:55] So there was a time in San Francisco where you guys, you decided to trust Gerald again. So after he had betrayed you?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:05:03] Well, Gerald and I pretty much came to an understanding that there would be a period of time where he would promise me that there would be no activity, and I would promise him I would learn everything I could about the subject, and we would just see how we would work. And so, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, that bargain was kept. But Gerald did want to introduce himself. He wanted to go to a gay father's meeting in San Francisco. He needed his identity, have some kind of contact. And, you know, and I will never know precisely what he may have done at whatever point, but as it became clear to us then, by 78, that the only way we could salvage any kind of relationship was to. To divorce.

John Dehlin [02:06:04] You know, when just a traditional spouse cheats on the other spouse, just heterosexually one time, that can be an immediate. Not only an immediate deal breaker, an immediate divorce, but it can lead to eternal hatred and animosity of immense proportions, where the offender is demonized and loses all rights and privileges and becomes hated forevermore erased from any sense of love or compassion. And some would argue that doing it as a gay person with maybe even multiple partners would be beyond unforgivable. Yet you, like, not only gave him another chance, but seemed to embrace him and love him and understand. How did you arrive at that? Why wasn't he kicked out, kids taken away, relocated Somewhere. And he became the evil, bad one that we were not to talk about, or if we did, he was to be demonized.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:07:21] I don't know. That's just not the way I saw it. And in that first shock in Provo, when I realized. Neither one of us wanted the family to end, Gerald told me the worst fear in the world he could think of was that he would no longer have me and his children in his life. And I knew that was true.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:07:54] And. Somehow, I mean, I was thrown into a totally new geography that I had no help in walking, that here was this awful, evil thing that had been thrust into my life. But I knew that Gerald in his being, was not an evil man. I knew that.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:08:29] And so really, just day by day and bit by bit, I tried to piece together and figure out what was to be done. And I always knew that I would not be able ever to sustain a marriage where fidelity was not part of it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:08:59] And then when we did decide to end the marriage, you know, I could go back and second guess myself all the time and say, okay, maybe at that point. Well, no, no, I thought about, well, should I move back to you, Doc? Should I take the kids away from him? Is this a bad. Is he a bad influence on the kids? Is. Whatever.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:09:23] And I just didn't ever come to a place of saying, I need to keep him away from the children. I need to take them. And I'm not saying that this is the only right way that somebody could face a situation like this. And I think I would respect a lot of people who would make a totally different decision on this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:09:52] I'm just saying that in my particular case, step by step, this seemed to be the step that I could live with the best. And then after the divorce, to maintain a friendship with Gerald seemed to me more correct than cutting him off.

John Dehlin [02:10:18] And the kids loved him.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:10:19] Oh, yeah, yeah. And he would come out first twice a week, and then once a week. But I'm not telling you at all that this was a perfect situation or if I could go back, there are things I would do that Gerald became more of a friend to the kids than a father.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:10:44] And he brought especially Emily into his life in a way of wanting her to approve him. And that was inappropriate. So there are a number of things that I would go back and say, boy, not that, not that, not that, not that. But at the moment, I didn't have a clear bead on that. Gerald and I agreed that the kids could go in to visit him and they would not see anything that would be different from. I mean, of course, that's an outrageous wish of mine.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:11:20] But anyway, things played out as they did, and then, as you know, we come to the end of the story, and shall we just go on to the end of the story, or do you.

John Dehlin [02:11:29] It sounds like a heady and a terrifying time to be a gay man in San Francisco.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:11:36] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:38] Like, I get the sense that he was terrified about this decision of, I don't want to give up my family. I love my children. He loved you. But he felt like he couldn't suppress this part of him any longer.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:11:54] That's absolutely true. And somebody on the outside would say, oh, come on. But that is how he experienced it. And I probably put it in there. He said, if I could cut off an arm or a leg or all of them, I would do that to expunge this problem for us. But I can't. It's who I am.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:12:17] And as I knew the minute I met Gerald, he was hungry for experience, for knowing, for learning, for figuring out who he was and everything else was. Gerald was not a person that could put a lid on him and say, okay, that's all now just shut up and be quiet.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:12:37] So he continued to explore what to him, and many people would say, this is totally insane to him was emotional, sexual, spiritual learning. And of course, what you say is true. It was an insane time in San Francisco.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:13:01] And all of these. These people who had been so alone and suppressed and told how evil they were to find a place that accepted them. And all of these crazy things were, you know, little kid in the candy store who finally able.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:13:23] No limits. There was craziness going on. And I saw Gerald trying to. Gerald wanted a partner that he could truly be with and live with and grow old. Oh, yes. That's what he wanted.

John Dehlin [02:13:42] And he kept trying.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:13:43] He did.

John Dehlin [02:13:44] And he kept bringing you his boyfriends.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:13:45] Okay, yeah, yeah, a number of them. And I went to the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus because Gerald asked me to, and saw these men marching down the aisles in white, seeing if my friends could see me now as I sat there weeping. And the lady next to me said, who are you here to see? I said, my husband. So, yeah. And listen, I am not saying that this is the way everybody should play out such and such a scenario. I am only saying this is how it played out for us. And from moment to moment, I just did the best I could.

John Dehlin [02:14:33] And that chorus was sort of his creative.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:14:37] Oh, he didn't begin it, but it

John Dehlin [02:14:39] was his creative high point.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:14:40] Oh, yeah. Yes. And he was producer of the first national tour of the San Francisco Gift. And he was deeply proud of that.

John Dehlin [02:14:48] And Dianne Feinstein was the mayor at the time. And there was a big, oh, listen,

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:14:54] do you know what? When I saw the movie Milk, or before I went to see it, I got into my diary to see what was going on, just because I remembered that Gerald had said so. I found this place in my diary. I found it rapidly.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:15:10] The day that Harvey Milk was shot, Gerald called home, called me that night. He was so stunned, as everybody was. And he had, two weeks prior, had lunch with Harvey Milk. And he told me that Harvey had said to him at that time that he was taping his whole story and his goals for the gay community because he felt that he was not going to live for a long, long time. And there was just two weeks after that that he was killed. And the choice that Dustin Lance Black made in creating the screenplay was Milk sitting at his table speaking into his tape recorder.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:16:02] So, yeah, as Gerald called me, he was so distressed. And he went to the candlelight vigil. And I remember him crying in that conversation, oh, yes, he was going to the candlelight vigil. And there was going to be possibly a lot of violence going on. I mean, who knows what was happening. There had been no, excuse me. This was the time when the verdict came that Dan Brown and his Twinkie defense was always. He was getting off very, very lightly. That's when San Francisco erupted and cars were turned over and all of this. And Gerald called again at that time and said, I'm going to go to the vigil.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:16:52] And he said, I just wanted to let. To call and tell you and the kids again that I love you so much in case something happens to me tonight. So he was deeply involved in all of that stuff, and it meant something historically and personally to him that was huge.

John Dehlin [02:17:15] Milk was there. Martin Luther King.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:17:17] Yeah. And I think that's a very important movie that people should see the movie Milk. So, yes, Gerald went out hunting for his true love. And as I comment in the book, he said to me at least once, oh, Blossom, if I could ever find a man like you, I'd be in seventh heaven.

John Dehlin [02:17:43] Painful words to hear from you.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:17:46] Yeah. So should we just go on to the end of this?

John Dehlin [02:17:48] Yes. So multiple boyfriends with the hopes of finding the true love. Never found him. Then he got sick.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:17:57] Right. And Gerald had been sick for about a year, but he. He did not dare go in for testing. And according we found out about the AIDS virus, it was a brand new Thing. Nobody knew why it was striking gay men. It was all brand new stuff.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:18:13] And this was 84 that. Well, Gerald had been ill in 83. And then I think in March of 84, he finally went in and got tested. And he. I think it was by phone he called and told me that he. Yes, he had tested positive for the virus. And then he came out that week, and then we told the children and.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:18:39] But Gerald was going to beat it. And, you know, and there were all of these, you know, certain things being discovered. The virus was isolated, and people thought maybe, you know, we can quickly handle this. And Gerald was full of optimism, and he did his affirmations. Listen, I've got about five notebooks of Gerald writing out his affirmations on the pages. I am. Well, I am, you know, all of these good things. I am a valuable son of God. And during this last part of his life, he was deeply anguished about Mormonism, about the condemnation that he had always had to live through, that he felt was part of the reason he was vulnerable to getting this illness.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:19:27] And at one point he said to me, you know, it's not. It's not that I don't hate the church. The church hates me. And there was such tremendous distress there about the kind of God that had always been created for him by, you know, the only religion he had ever known. When he left the church, he found a lot of ways to maintain a spirituality. And it was important to him to try to help other gay people who had left or been kicked out of their churches know that they were still spiritual beings. That was terribly important to him.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:20:13] And he devised these lessons that he gave about meditation and about our oneness and everything. But anyway, he had a lot of spiritual anguish going on right up to the end. And so it was in July that he did pass away.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:20:36] And when he first became ill, you know, and I'm not saying this is what. How the decision that everybody should would be appropriate for everybody, but I said, gerald, do you want to come out and be with us?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:20:51] And he didn't because he needed the medical benefits in San Francisco. And anyway, coming toward the end of the story here, The kids and I had gone for. Away for vacation, and he had been in my house for while we were gone. But when we came back, we knew I had had my friends come in to make sure he was okay and to whatever. But when we. When we came back, he was just a shell. We'd only be gone about two and a half weeks.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:21:29] And so I sent the kids to be with a friend while I figured out how to handle all this. And I thought it would probably be, who knew? Months. His doctor told me it could be months, but so Gerald was there at my home for the last week or week and a half or whatever it was, and his mother came in to help.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:21:55] And so he was there on my couch. And yes, here is where you're remembering that. I asked my friend Annie Moss to go give the information to the bishop. And then the good Mormon machinery came into action. And, you know, this is worth shedding some tears about because, you know, when, as I wrote there, Mormons who can't even understand the idea of homosexuality, but they understand pain.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:22:44] And so my dear visiting teacher Sister Spencer called and said, now I'm not going to ask you what you need or I'm not going to say, tell me what. Call me if you need something. She said, I'm going to call you at 9 o' clock every morning and you give me the list.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:23:04] So I did. And dear Ted and Nola, Merle Christensen came over and spent an hour or spent a whole day out in the cleaning the back of the yard. And of course, that was a really difficult time, obviously in every possible way, but there was some peace there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:23:31] And I was going to bring the children back, but when I saw that it was going so rapidly, I just made the decision not to. But they. The kids spoke to Jaren on the phone.

John Dehlin [02:23:48] There's a point in the book where he's really sick and you decide to climb into bed with him.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:23:53] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:23:57] Can you tell us a little bit about that and what you sang?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:24:04] What did I sing him? Some lullabies. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Yeah. I. Gerald was toward the end, he couldn't speak a lot and he had some physical distress. And one night I did climb into bed with him and just was up against him and held him and I was singing him the lullabies angel lullaby that I had written for Emily while she was still in utero and the one that has become quite well known in my turn on earth.

John Dehlin [02:24:43] And how's it go? You don't have to sing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:24:46] Oh, you want to sing?

John Dehlin [02:24:46] You don't have.

John Dehlin [02:24:47] If you want.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:24:54] Just a sec. You came from a land where all is light to a world half day, a world half night to guide you by day you have my love and to guard you by night your friends above. So sleep, sleep till the darkness ends Guarded by your angel friends oh, sleep, sleep till the darkness ends Guarded by your angel friends.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:25:49] There's one. Stand softly by your bed and another sits close with a hand on your head there's one at the window Watching for the dawn and one waits to wake you when the night is gone so sleep, sleep till the darkness ends Guarded by your angel friends yes, sleep, sleep till the darkness ends Guarded by your angel friends.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:26:43] I've sung that lullaby to gay men over the phone. So, yes, and then I remember Gerald got sick, and I had to clean us both up. You know, dying is a messy thing, But I remember, too, and I probably tell it in there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:27:10] And this is pertinent to a lot of things we're going through today, culturally. There was one. I was. Toward the very end, Gerald was sleeping on the couch in the front room, and I was sleeping on the other couch in the nearby. In the family room.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:27:31] And he started calling out, come on, come on, come on. And I went in and said, what's happening, Gerald? And he had purchased one ticket to Le Cage a the musical play, when he still had a little money and it was coming, I don't know, months later.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:27:53] And he was lying there in sort of a delirious state. He told me, I'm in the theater. I'm waiting for La Cage aux Faux. And they won't open the curtains. They won't open the curtains. So he was lying there, come on, come on.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:28:15] And he didn't ever get to see La Cage a Faux. And I want to mention that here because La Cage aux Faux was really the first time that a gay relationship had been portrayed in the musical theater as a romance.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:28:36] And I heard an interview with Jerry Herman, the writer, about the phenomenon that that was. It was the first time that on stage there was a love song that one man sang to another. And I guess I want to bring that up because one of the things we don't get is that gay men actually fall in love and would sing a romantic song one to the other.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:29:05] Because so many of us think that it's just some little evil twist, but it's not falling in love the way real people fall in love. But that's what that play represented to Gerald, and that's what he wanted. I mean, he wanted for gay people to have their relationships honored in a way that they could be nourished and be a couple, the way that the couple was portrayed in La Cage aux Faux.

John Dehlin [02:29:40] Those are some of his dying thoughts.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:29:43] Yeah. So that's just one memory I have of those last difficult days. And then. And I was feeding him carrot juice and carrot juice and carrot juice. But then, you know, when we knew it was And I just gave him ice cubes, and I played the guitar for him, and I got out his Walt Whitman book and I read some of his pieces that he had marked to him. So then it was, you know, it was just a very quiet ending of his life there on the couch.

John Dehlin [02:30:30] I love the last couple paragraphs in the conclusion of Goodbye, I Love youe. Would you mind reading those?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:30:40] Oh. When Gerald was dying, we. We talked about that we would. We'll have a picnic in the next life when we know more and we'll just get to talk about all this. So here at the end of the book, Gerald and I will have our picnic. I'm planning. I'm planning it now. Our many picnics. After I have traveled the tunnel and been welcomed into the light, I will search the faces for one of my favorite people. And he will be there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:31:11] Gerald and I will walk together and laugh and embrace, sealed as friends forever through years of tears and hopes and joys and devastation and the final precious knowledge of how dearly we still loved each other after all the weeping was done.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:31:29] And whoever is in charge of all this will walk with us and will help us to sort out the mysteries and help us to complete the healing. Walls will fall and we will see each other more clearly, all of us. The Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Muslims and the straights and the gays and the women and the men.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:31:53] Confusions will lift like fog lifts from the Golden Gate Bridge on a good summer day. And we will each see our next step and will take it. Gerald's insatiable hunger for learning will find ready fields, and I will smile as I see him bounding in with some bright new knowledge to share.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:32:13] Very much as I saw him bounding up the stairs hundreds of times, his blond head arising sun blossom. Did you know? Hmm? Yeah. And, John, I haven't. I am not always as emotionally drawn back into this story, and I don't. I'm not going to apologize for it, because I want everyone to know that every other story, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands in our own culture, deserve tears.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:32:57] Because today, right now, there are gay people and their families who are weeping and who have some better tools to deal with it than Gerald and I did. But to a large extent, we are still in the Dark ages about understanding this, about allowing it to be a topic of conversation that is not immediately covered with guilt and abomination.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:33:32] And so I'm glad to offer my emotional response to all this as an invitation to everybody to know that in their ward, in their stake, in their neighborhood. There are gay people who are in anguish, who are considering suicide at this very moment.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:33:58] There are parents who say, what have I done? How can I manage? How can I manage to love my church and love my gay child? There are people who weep. And every day in our community that ought to be much more of a Christlike community who want to understand, want to embrace, want to do what.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:34:23] What is really helpful to so many people, rather than feeling comfortable saying, oh, I know what to do. I will love the sinner and hate the sin. That's all I need to do. And it is so much the invitation that is out to our Mormon community to rise to what is obviously one of the biggest challenges in the church at this moment, in public relations and in inner activity, is so huge that I am happy to be one who says, here's the invitation. Stand up and do your part.

Writing and Publishing Goodbye, I Love You

John Dehlin [02:35:09] So two years after Gerald died, Right. Goodbye. I love you was published.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:35:16] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:35:17] What was that like?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:35:19] Oh, it was a big. It was big. Gerald and I never discussed the idea that I would write our story, which seems weird now, but he never crossed our conversation. And it was a couple of weeks after his passing that being inundated with all these awful stories of young men being totally abandoned by their families and dying alone with aids, and knowing that my particular Mormon community was still very ignorant on the subject of homosexuality, it occurred to me that maybe I should write something. And I.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:35:56] I wrote a proposal for an article for Good Housekeeping or Red Book, a Ladies Home Journal, whatever. And to shorten all this, because we need to, I was able to get an agent who very quickly sold the idea of a book to Random House.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:36:17] And I worked with that editor. And I went back through my diaries and was able to find a lot of very important, immediate material. And I spent about a year writing the book, and then they took another year to get it published.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:36:36] So it came out in 86. And that was a very scary, scary time. I remember when the publicist at Random House called me and said, we're getting things in motion here. And we've had a request for an advance copy of the book by a Deseret book company in Salt Lake. They want to see that. And I just about went into heart failure. I thought, I'm not ready for this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:37:10] What is this going to mean? And, of course, I had thought through all the contingencies, and all I knew is that it was something that I had to do. After I got Gerald's parents permission and my children as far as they were able to know what was going on, said, yes, this is something our dad would want and it will be good.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:37:29] So I was terrified when I thought, what's going to happen to me? You know? And my income was essentially from my Mormon audience primarily. But my.

John Dehlin [02:37:46] Anyway, because you didn't pull punches in this book. I mean, you probably did, but it's a hard hitting book. When I read this, 50 pages into it, I'm like, she updated this in a more recent version because it's too hard hitting. It's too intense. There's no way a book like this could have been published in the 80s without serious consequences coming down on the person who wrote it, because it condemns. It doesn't condemn, but it challenges church culture, church leadership.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:38:20] Okay, Mores. John Dellen, are you sitting down?

John Dehlin [02:38:24] I'm ready.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:38:29] So a couple of weeks later, the publicist at Random House called me back and she said, deseret Book has ordered a thousand copies of no More Goodbyes and they are asking if you would do an autograph session at their store on a weekend that they're calling general conference.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:38:54] And honestly, when she said that to me, I think I burst into tears. It was. It was such a relief and it was so. It was so moving to me. And I remember about that time I had a conversation or after with the buyer at Deseret Book who told me that he and his wife had stayed up all night reading it in tears and knew how important it was.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:39:18] So. So, yes, Random House put out the book. I was on all the talk shows. I was on Good Morning America, Oprah. They sent me on a eight, I think an eight city tour, including Salt Lake, and I did a big thing at Sunstone. It was kind of a historic moment. And.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:39:39] But when I came to Salt Lake and I went into the downtown Deseret bookstore for the autograph session, and when I came in, there was already a long line and it was quiet. And each of these people who came up to have me sign the book and thanked me and hugged me, and I just knew that each one of them had such a precious, awful story.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:40:10] And I was just so deeply grateful that I could be there for them. And then I did Deseret Book at Orem. That's where I met Bruce Bastian. My dear, dear, dear friend. What a good man he is. And the book sold rapidly. Really, really well. Now, this sounds like I'm making it up, but it's not the person who was, I guess, the buyer who was taking me around at the Downtown Deseret bookstore then or later told me that in that first month of the release of Goodbye, I Love youe, he said they sold more of that title than they had of any other title in a single month in.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:40:57] In his history with the. With the company. And. And I really was not surprised at all that because I knew of the need. I mean, I knew, as Matthew Arnold said in that poem, we read the same heart beats in every human breast.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:41:15] And in that so many Mormon families, this same thing was being played out in one way or another. So I was not surprised at the hunger that people bought the book. There was maybe one bookstore who decided never again to sell any more Carolyn Pearson book books because this was such an awful thing that I had done to write this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:41:39] But in general, the response was so positive. And honestly, I was prepared for a kind of a minority, but yet a significant negative response. But I didn't get it. And I'm sure that there were people talking out on the fringes.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:42:00] Can you imagine? She would write that. But very little of that came to me. The letters that I received were almost all so positive and so grateful, I began to file them in separate categories just so I would know. So I had a file for Mormon, gay Mormon, lesbian, non Mormon, gay Mormon, parents of Da, da, da. And, you know, the largest file that I accumulated of letters was LDS General, meaning not a parent writing to me, not a gay person, but just an ordinary Mormon person saying, I just want to thank you for helping me understand something that I have never understood before. So I'm glad to be able to tell you that that's the reception that. Goodbye, I love you.

John Dehlin [02:42:56] Was it because you were protected by the fact that you had lost your husband and people aren't going to go after a widow? Or was it that everyone was excited to have a Mormon break through to a national audience and be on Oprah? What was it?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:43:09] Well, no, no, it was because there was something really genuine and human and vulnerable. And of course, I'm sure a lot of people were sorry for me because of everything that I had to go through. But this was not just some.

John Dehlin [02:43:27] I'm wondering why.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:43:28] Poor little.

John Dehlin [02:43:28] Why weren't they angry? Why they weren't angry, why they weren't feeling like this is no Man Knows My History, Part two, You know, Fawn Brody, like someone who's out to take the church down.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:43:39] John. Because it's not.

John Dehlin [02:43:41] Right, right, right.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:43:42] It's not.

John Dehlin [02:43:42] But sometimes that's how people interpret things.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:43:46] Oh, I understand now. I did. I got a call from A woman in the south who said, I have a group of Mormon ladies that we meet with all the time, and they want me to call and ask you why you have not been excommunicated yet.

John Dehlin [02:44:01] Right?

John Dehlin [02:44:02] Yeah.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:44:03] So I'm sure that there were some of those kinds of questions, but I did not ever really feel coming toward me anything as significant as the kind of gratitude that came toward me. And that's the case to this day, in everything, all of my issues, I have received so much more appreciation and gratitude than anything else.

John Dehlin [02:44:38] Sure.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:44:40] So the book came out and sold really well. And that opened the door for me to start receiving hundreds and hundreds of stories from gay people, from their families. And see, that's been, what, 25 years ago? So now, of course, I get emails. And almost every day there's one or more email from somebody either simply wanting to thank me for my work or needing some encouragement not to kill himself. So let me bring us.

Facing East and Advocacy for LGBT Latter-day Saints

John Dehlin [02:45:21] I have to just say that my friend who called me this morning serendipitously said that one late night, in real sadness and desperation, he emailed you quite late, and within an hour he had received a personal response from you.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:45:37] I've talked to a lot of people, and I email. I respond to every email. Oh, yeah. And really, it's a shame. Well, I guess we can get into that. That we don't have more immediate help to give our gay people.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:45:59] So a few years ago, realizing that we were not where we need to be still on this subject and wanting to get back to my work with the theater, I wrote Facing east, story of a Mormon couple dealing with the suicide of their gay son. Unfortunately, Plan B in Salt Lake.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:46:24] And with the financial assistance of Bruce Bastian, who underwrote their production, they staged the play in 06. And it was a wonderful event in Salt Lake, had a lot of publicity, and the theater was filled. And it was thrilling to me to watch all these different people come in, people I could know. Okay, there's a gay couple.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:46:58] Here's a couple of hippies with their piercings and their black and their orange hair and all that. Here's a couple in their sacrament, meeting clothing. All these. This variety of people came to the play, and during the play, there would not be a sound.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:47:23] And the whole thing is at the graveyard, at the site, the grave site, at the cemetery of the young man who has just taken his life,

John Dehlin [02:47:34] who,

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:47:35] of course, was patterned after so many people whose bits of stories I knew. And of course, the most public suicide has been Stuart Mattis. I didn't meet him. I have not met his parents. And he was not really the main person I had in mind in writing Facing East. Especially when I talk about why this young man took his life on the temple ground.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:48:01] I was thinking, I tell his story in no More Goodbyes. My dear friend, Brad Adams, who you know, just like you have said, these young men do everything right. He joined the church that was going to cure him. He went on a mission that was going to cure him.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:48:19] He did all these faithful things. Nothing cured him. He went to his bishop in Provo. This was quite some time ago, once a week for a full year to get a blessing. And all that blessing he did was to stop him from feeling anything for anybody. And at the end of that year, he knew he was never going to change.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:48:40] And he said to me, I knew I was going to the lowest kingdom anyway. I'd just as well go now. He gathered all the pills he could. He went to Provo Temple, sat on a bench there thinking, well, this is not a political. In the play, you think it's going to be a political statement against the church? No, it's not. I quoted my friend exactly saying, I knew there would be kind angels hovering around that place that would take me in. Now, that should just break our hearts, because everybody should have been those kind angels for him.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:49:18] And he took his pills and he went unconscious and evidently walked. And he was discovered the next morning and was in a coma for two weeks. And then he went to San Francisco, and that's where I met him. I met him at an affirmation banquet. I sat by him and he said, sister, after I spoke, he said, sister Pearson, do you know what makes me sadder than anything?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:49:42] To know that in the next life I want to be where you and Heavenly Father and Jesus are. And to know that I can never be there just breaks my heart. And I said, brad, are you kidding me?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:49:52] You think you know and you think everybody else knows where people are going to be in the next world? He said, oh, I wish I had a friend like you. I said, brad, I'll be your friend. So Brad and I became friends. And he was my first computer person that helped me learn. And Bruce Bastian gave me my first computer.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:50:10] But that's. Brad is who I was thinking of when I wrote that awful little bit in there that should just break all of our hearts. The Desiree News gave Facing east its Best Drama of the Year award. And then it had a limited Off Broadway run and a San Francisco run.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:50:30] And that's been Performed by a variety of universities, community theaters, Roundabout, most recently in Rochester, New York where the stake president there purchased one of the performances to have his stake members come in. After which he and the area president who worked there gave headed a fireside about the subject and invoking everyone to become more aware and more compassionate.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:51:07] And so that's facing east. But then I wanted to have it occurred to me that I needed to and hadn't had a book on this subject since Goodbye, I love you. And so I quickly put together and self published no More Goodbyes, which has proven to be a really important book to a lot of people telling, kind of bringing us up to date where we are now is told primarily from a Mormon point of view, has bad stories, suicide stories, ill fated marriage stories, and a lot of good stories of families letting nothing come between them and their gay kids.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:51:43] And I love that that book has been out in this really critical time that we have been through, you know, where Prop 8 has thrown us into more intense battle over this whole thing. That book with its invitational tone and insistence that we are going to move to a better place on this subject that has been very important for a lot of people.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:52:10] There are really so many thrilling stories that I could tell you about how no More Goodbyes has helped families and gay people and the play too. I'm remembering one of the performances in Salt Lake City. We often had a talk back with the cast and crew and the audience afterwards. And on this occasion, right over to this side was a young woman who stood up and said, I'm a lesbian. This is my partner. We love each other, we want to be together.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:52:41] I know my mother will never accept this. When is this play going to come back? Because I want so much to have my mother come and see this. And she started to cry and I left the front of the stage and I walked over and I gave her a hug and I said, this is from the cast and crew and I think from everybody in the this audience and that, that her mother loves her in the best way that she can, even not understanding this, this issue. And anyway, we talked then and after the play a little bit. But when the play was in in New York, I was checking my email and there was a, an.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:53:19] An email whose heading said thank you for saving my partner's life. And it was from the, the. The young woman who was with that young woman saying so and so had seriously, truly been moving toward ending her life.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:53:36] And that moment in the theater of seeing the play and receiving my hug and hearing the conversation around she felt that she could go on. And those are the kinds of stories that I am so fortunate to get so often from people. And it's an enormous privilege to be able to work on this frontier.

John Dehlin [02:54:06] Was it difficult, has it been difficult to receive so much positive, affirming gratitude and praise for your work, for goodbye. Love you. For facing east, for other things and to feel so much support from church members and then to have Proposition 8 happen.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:54:27] Yeah, yeah, that was a disaster. And having lived through Proposition 22 in the year 2000, which I tell about somewhere in no More Goodbyes, that when my former bishop and home teacher came around canvassing as he was assigned to do, and what did I tell him at that moment? Something clever. Oh, no, I said, listen, listen, David, it's not that the Brethren don't want gay men to marry. They want them to marry me and they want them to marry my daughter. And that's not okay.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:55:13] And when you go to sleep tonight, I would like you to think, would you like one of our beautiful young LDS gay man fresh office mission to come and marry one of your two daughters? So, and as I say that, and as I tell that little story in nomarch advice, I do not mean truly that the Brethren want them, these marriages to take place. They have made a statement, theoretically that we're not encouraging that this, this is not a remedy for this problem.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:55:44] But that means very little to somebody who believes that his eternal life is in jeopardy and that he's faithful enough to make it happen. So anyway, we're way behind where we need to be, wherever that is, we're way behind. So, yes, that was Proposition 22. And then in 08, and the, the, the letter that was about to be read over the pulpit came onto the Internet, the Internet, the week prior.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:56:20] And. For some reason I feel obligated to do what I can. If there's some way that I can, at least I have to express what I feel. And so prior to that letter being read, I made four phone calls to church headquarters, two to public relations offices, one in California, one in Salt Lake City, two to general authorities offices. And I just identified myself and said, I am, I'm just calling to express my grief at what is about to happen in California.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:57:12] I need to underline for you that you will be receiving the worst public relations of your lifetime. You will be dividing more families than you have ever any idea. You'll be alienating neighbor from neighbor. You will not receive one bit of benefit from what's about to happen.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:57:31] And I had Good conversations with whoever it was, the two PR people that I spoke to. And I wasn't able to speak to the two general authorities, but I gave their secretaries, I said, I want you to write this down to convey to them.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:57:52] And I said to them, if they should have a moment to speak to me, I would really like that. To my surprise, one of these general authorities did call me back, and we had a long and very respectful and profitable conversation.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:58:14] And it essentially was me speaking and him listening and replying. And I would like to have on record pretty much one of the major things that I said to him at that time. I said, just a few months ago, I watched the movie Amazing Grace, which is the story of the ending of the slave trade in Great Britain. And I sat there thinking, why was it so hard for them?

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:58:50] Why couldn't they see? You just don't do that. You don't take another human being and have half of these people die on a boat and then use them the rest of their life. You don't do that. But that's where human consciousness was at that point in history.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:59:05] And I said, how dare we even ever think that we are at the end point of human consciousness, that we understand everything about the human family? We're just at another point along the way. And I said, when we Mormons get really historically clear on our whole journey, we will have a long list of things that we are very, very proud of. And I can make that list as well as anybody alive.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:59:33] And then we're going to have another list of things we are not very proud of. I said, we will always, of course, be uncomfortable with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We will always be uncomfortable with polygamy. We will always be uncomfortable with our history with racism.

Carol Lynn Pearson [02:59:51] And I said, I believe that we will be uncomfortable that at a given time in history when we could, when our church could have taken a leadership role in issues that we conveniently called women's issues, such as bringing back the concept of the divine part of the Godhead, of the feminine part of the divine, and the Godhead, that rather than doing that, we chose to work actively against it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:00:19] But I said, I believe our greatest shame is going to be reserved for how we have treated our gay brothers and sisters, because I don't think there was one black man who ever took his life over how we made him feel in not being able to hold priesthood in our church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:00:37] And neither I nor any of my women friends have taken our lives over issues that were and are deeply important to us, being not only marginalized but actively worked against, however, hundreds, and I do mean hundreds of our best, most beautiful LDS gay men, some women, but mostly men, have taken their lives because we have made them feel so hopeless and so worthless. And when we get a real bead on that, our shame will be enormous.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:01:16] And our conversation went on and I said some other things and. And it was. But so Here came Proposition 8. And it did. It just went across the land like a disastrous tornado and left nothing in its wake but pain and sadness and divided families and divided wards. And, you know, there are way too many instances of, you know, awful things that happened along the way in that

Proposition 8 and Staying in the Church

John Dehlin [03:01:53] a. The.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:01:56] The sister of a good friend of mine who was a Stake Relief Society president in Southern California, put it this way, and, and she was one of the stalwart soldiers. She said because of Prop 8, she has lost the friendship of the family to her left, the family to her right.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:02:20] She said, I feel like the generals came in from Salt Lake, told us to go into battle and then left, left the bodies on the field, left us to figure out what to do about it. That's the statement from this Relief Saudi president, whom I know.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:02:40] So, yes, it was total disaster. And yes, as we know, the PR that the church has received over that has been so horrendous. I always in everything, have to say, okay, everything moves us forward in one way or another. Terrible things move us forward in one way or another. And may it be so for this. May it, you know, have been sufficiently shocking that it's been a wake up call and it has been to a lot of people.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:03:22] I am not privy to conversations among the general authorities. A couple of years ago, I signed individually and sent to every one of them a copy of no More Goodbyes. I didn't expect to hear from any of them, but I got three letters of thank you, saying that they were reading it, they were learning, and that they were appreciative of the work that I have done on this very important, sensitive subject.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:03:50] So that's. And good things, of course, do come out of that. Now I will tell you for a little bit about the good people in my own stake. And it may come as a surprise to anybody watching this podcast that I have never been hauled into a church court. I have never been treated with anything except not just tolerance, but real appreciation by my local church leaders, my bishops, my stake presidents.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:04:31] I have been treated so well by all of those people, and I have had really fine leaders. At this moment, my stake, the Oakland stake, is led by three of the best Men, I think, exist on the planet, and they have been aware of the damage they have seen one of their wards actually pretty much ripped into.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:04:59] And they concluded that there were things that they could do without being commanded in all things from the top. And so these three really fine men last year went around to each other ward in the stake and gave a presentation to the combined priesthood and relief Society on better understanding and loving our gay brothers and sisters.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:05:29] And they use Scripture and they use some good quotations from the leading brethren in Salt Lake and talked about that people do not choose their sexuality and some of the problems that exist, the suicides, and that families must keep close their gay children and that all of us must look with kindness and love and compassion on our gay brothers and sisters, whatever their choices are.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:06:08] And these were all beautiful presentations and have created a lot of tremendous goodwill in my stake. A lot of families have felt a little safer coming back to church. And a friend of mine told me the story about the next week in a high priest meeting, one of the most conservative brethren in the world saying, I need to apologize to all the men in this room.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:06:40] When I went home last week after hearing this presentation, I was a little troubled on my thought, but I had to do some praying and I had to do some studying. And I've concluded that I have been wrong in some ways. And so I'm apologizing to every man here for some things I've said in the past.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:06:57] I could tell you a lot of good stories like that of just enlightenment and kindness and education that have come as a result of all that. So it is my hope that some of the awful things can stimulate some of the good things. Because as you know, this is one of the major things of society and church that's up on the table now that we have to examine, like it or not, and we have to do it, and we just better get more busily about it and try to do it through the eyes of Christ.

Practical Counsel for LGBT Members and Their Families

John Dehlin [03:07:44] Let's turn for a minute to some practical sharing of experience or advice or wisdom or anything that you have in your arsenal to help people who are in the thick of trying to figure out how to navigate their life. So I'm going to give you four or five or six different people in certain stations in this dilemma and ask if you have any experiences, stories, advice, insight to share as they're trying to navigate their way.

John Dehlin [03:08:20] So the first would be a young man or woman, let's say 18, 19, 20, who's on the precipice of deciding whether or not to go down the road of the Mormon path. Do I go on a mission which then is going to lead to probably temple marriage?

John Dehlin [03:08:43] Is there a place for me in the church? Should I do what the others have done and just sort of dive in as a huge leap of faith that there's a place for me in this church? Or do I just bail because only sadness awaits at the other end?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:09:04] Yeah. I have never said to anybody on any occasion, I know exactly what you ought to do, and it's this. But I do receive a lot of emails of the general type that you're expressing. And I would never say, oh, don't go on a mission. That's just going to compound the problem.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:09:29] The only thing I consistently say to young people like that who do email me is I say, I want you to believe in yourself before you believe in anything else. That's maybe the most consistent thing I say to anybody who contacts me. Because so many of these, especially these young gay people who have tried and tried and tried to change and to do things the way that the church asks them to do and find that they are unable to take everything on themselves and they are totally unworthy of anything and often have just tremendous personality problems of the psyche and a darkness of the spirit that they don't feel themselves to be worthy of being.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:10:24] Often and to these young people, I absolutely say, put away your belief in anything that is going to tell you that you are unworthy of life. And you know what? When Stuart Mattis was consulting with his bishop before he took his life, and his bishop wisely said, stuart, if it is, if it's a choice between your life and the church, take your life and run. Run with it. Leave the church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:10:55] I never say to anybody, oh, obviously you ought to leave the church, but I do say, believe in yourself before you believe in anything else.

John Dehlin [03:11:04] But isn't that the opposite of how we might interpret Christ's message? He said, lose your life and you will find it. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all things will be added unto you. I tend to agree with you. But how do you reconcile that with the Scripture?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:11:26] Well, I don't know that the best interpretation of that is to whittle away at everything you are so that there's nothing left. One of the dilemmas of the model Mormon mother is to give little pieces of herself everywhere, everywhere, without filling her own bucket and saying, okay, I'm supposed to lose my life. Everybody else's life counts except mine. And that doesn't lead to anybody's good and it would not lead to anybody's good. In the cases that we're speaking of here, people have to have a good sense of who they are before they can give their life away to anybody.

John Dehlin [03:12:23] Okay, the next role. 22, 23 year old man or woman knows they're gay. Mission didn't fix it. Found someone who they think might be a suitable companion and is trying to decide, do I marry a member of the opposite sex even though I know I'm gay?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:12:49] I have never encouraged anybody to marry a member of the opposite sex if they know that they are gay. I say from my experience, I cannot possibly urge you to do that.

John Dehlin [03:13:01] Have you had associates who have done that and made it work? Do you know people who have been able to figure that out happily?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:13:11] Well, I know marriages that have survived. The risk is just too great, I mean, for me to say, oh yeah, you know, I think you have a really good chance of making this marriage work. I would never say absolutely. Well, yes, I have said. I mean, women have, women have conquered. Oh, I'm so in love with my boyfriend and he's gay. But, but we think we can really make it work. I cannot say, sure, you're strong enough to go ahead and do it. I have to say, from my experience of myself and everybody that I have seen, the risk is too great. I would tell you, do not enter into that marriage.

John Dehlin [03:14:06] Not even with prayer and fasting and faith and scripture reading and devotion to the church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:14:13] Well, of course, in addition to that, I always would say to everybody, do you know what you have inside of you? Your own connection to God. And you listen to me. You listen to your neighbor, you listen to your family, you listen to the brethren, you listen to your bishop, you listen to everybody, everybody that you think has something to give you on this. And then you listen to your own connection to God. That's what I would say and what I do say.

John Dehlin [03:14:47] But in your experience, the risk, in

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:14:49] my experience, the risk is too large to go into that kind of a marriage.

John Dehlin [03:14:53] And you would never suggest your straight daughter or son to marry a gay partner?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:15:01] I think not. I will just take a moment to say that my dear wonderful daughter Emily, in her own particular insanity that she will perhaps discuss with you sometime, my brilliant, wonderful daughter, who is right now doing really, really well, did enter into such a marriage believing that they were being called upon to show that it can be done, that her parents didn't do it right. Reparative therapy can make this work. Well, it didn't. And the disaster is beyond enormous. So that's enough of that. Next question, who? A couple who now are married and have children. Yeah. Is that your next question?

John Dehlin [03:15:46] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:15:47] Thank you. So you're a 35, 40 year old man or woman who tried to make it work. They've been through it all. Prayer, fasting, bishopric, beautiful children. They've white knuckled it. And something inside them is just still calling out for the companionship of right.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:16:09] And again, I would not presume to say, oh, this is what you should do. I have said over and over and over in a case like that, either way you turn, there's going to be a large sacrifice. You have to make the decision of which sacrifice you want to live with.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:16:30] Try to think five years down the road, how would you feel about either one of these? On your deathbed, how would you feel about either one of these? And I'm not saying that for every person it's going to be the very same. Answer it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:16:49] And in a particular case where that, where the man is older and the children are all grown and I don't know, there have been cases where I have really said, I think you'd be giving up too much to end your marriage. I remember talking to a young man, he was fairly young then. They had, I think eight children.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:17:21] One was severely disabled. He was in love, he was a gay man, he had just white knuckled it all the way through. He was in love with a man. I remember just saying to him, I in this case, of the two sacrifices that you have got to decide between here I am hoping that you will give yourself to your family.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:17:53] And you know, there are a lot of, there are cases where. The husband and wife can come to a pretty equitable agreement that both of us in the long term will be better off if we do separate and we can hopefully manage to both of us do parenting. Well, there's no good answer to that.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:18:21] And truly, except in the rarest cases, do I say, I really feel this is the best thing for you. I say, you know, you have to, with the best inspiration that you are personally entitled to and in consultation with your spouse, figure out what is in the long run going to work. But that's very, very tough.

John Dehlin [03:18:53] What would you say to the man who's decided that he just need or the woman that's decided they do need to leave their spouse? What advice would you give them about navigating a post marriage?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:19:07] Well, if that decision has been made, I can only encourage somebody to do it with as much consideration and as much grace as possible. And I often recommend that they give one or both of these books to their spouse to be able to talk over all of the issues. If somebody has made the decision to leave, they just have to do it as best they can. And often there is no way to do any of this without pain.

John Dehlin [03:19:46] What if they're fearful? They don't want to become promiscuous. They want to find true love. You know, they want to basically have the Mormon life just with a man or woman of their dreams.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:20:00] There are so many who want that and the things being as they are, cannot have it.

John Dehlin [03:20:07] What do you mean?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:20:08] Oh, the parish will not accept them. No, if they want to have the Mormon life. And here is my, my gay partner and me and we are going to come to church and hold hands and sacrament meeting and whatever that is currently not allowed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:20:24] But there are a lot of Mormon gay people who love the Mormon lifestyle who have strong feelings about their commitment to everything they have learned at church. And if and if they had their first choice, they would love to be able to be a gay couple within the structure of the Mormon church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:20:48] Okay, so let me tell you about this young man who. Well, he emailed me, I don't know, three or four weeks ago, short email, just said, I thank you so much for your work. I am going through this incredible gethsemane. Please say a prayer for whatever he said. He.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:21:07] I always respond to these emails and once in a while I make a phone call. And he had his phone number there. So I called him and we had a good long phone conversation. He had just joined the church a month prior. He'd come from somewhere in the east and he had had, he had always been gay, known that he was gay and his parents were fine with it. And there wasn't any big religious thing where he grew.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:21:33] But so he joined the church and he loved how he felt at church. And he had. Well, he'd already fallen in love with a Mormon gay man and they had established a relationship that gay man's parents were horrified and they ended their physical relationship. But they remained really good friends.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:21:56] And this young man said to me that he wanted more than anything to be able to be in the church with his man that he loves more than anybody he's ever loved in his life. But he said, I don't think that's going to happen.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:22:17] And I asked him if he had some support where he is, if he had people to talk to, people to help. And I said, you know, in Salt Lake, there are, there are Non Mormon, gay kinds of support systems if you need them. And then he sort of started to cry and he said, I know, but there's too much promiscuity just going on in just the gay world in general. And that's not what I want.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:22:45] I don't want that. I want the way I feel when I'm in church. I want the church and I want this man that I'm in love with. And I don't think the church is going to let me have them both.

John Dehlin [03:22:59] You know, I just have to jump in. There are a lot of religious people who will say, I fear the person that I would have become without the gospel in my life. That without the gospel, who knows what types of horrible things I might have done. And I think that sometimes straight people are really eager to point the finger of scorn at gay people and the, quote, gay lifestyle and all the debauchery and orgies and promiscuity that goes on, realizing that these people don't have the benefit of a moral religious community.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:23:39] Well, yes, and let's acknowledge that there are now and have been really all along a certain number of gay couples who have been able to have long term faithful relationships today more than before. But certainly in some way we have taken these people, thrown them into the gutter, and then blamed them for getting dirty in the gutter.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:24:10] You know, there are a lot of religious people, Mormons included, who are more comfortable with the idea of gay people being in bathhouses than they are of gay people being in established relationships that have either the term marriage or whatever to validate that relationship.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:24:29] This wonderful lesbian woman that I know as, she came to a meeting at my home where there were also some local church leaders there. And we were talking about the various things we need to talk about on this. She said, you know, it is this brilliant. She's an attorney, very well spoken, very mild, and really irresistible.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:24:53] She said, I find it so strange that the most. And she married her partner during the time that it was legal in California and they are together raising two boys. She said, I find it so strange that the most conservative thing that the gay community has ever tried to do is the thing that has caused them the most hatred from straight people and that is to ask to be married.

John Dehlin [03:25:26] Yeah, yeah, we'd rather keep them illegitimate.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:25:29] We would, we would. But, you know, we're at this historical point right now where there's everything is just churning and churning and churning like the British Parliament was, where they were trying to figure out, oh, we can't stop the slave trade. That would be the end of our economy or when the people were.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:25:53] We can't let women vote. That would be the end of the family. Please. There are sermon after sermon after sermon of that time where they would be the end of the family if women were given the right to vote. So here we are now in this other historical time where it's going to be the end of civilization if we should give authentic credibility to gay relationships.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:26:20] And John, I do not pretend that I know exactly where everybody ought to be at the end of the road, where the general authorities need to be when in decades to come everything is finally figured out on this. But boy, I am here to say, and it is my obligation to say, we are not where we need to be.

John Dehlin [03:26:44] So for the young, for the man or woman who was married, had kids, decided they're going to leave their spouse and they realize that they just. There's no place for them in the church. Is there hope? You've alluded to it. Is there hope for them to find that partner and to live a meaningful, fulfilled, safe, healthy life? Should they?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:27:09] Of course.

John Dehlin [03:27:10] Or is that just a fantasy? I mean, Gerald didn't find it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:27:13] Oh, no, no, he did not. And there are plenty who do not, my dear. There are plenty of us heterosexual people who do not find what we think we deserve. But double, triple, quadruple the difficulty for gay people, really, just because of what society has traditionally allowed them or not. But do I know any healthy gay relationships? Of course I do.

John Dehlin [03:27:46] Long term even?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:27:48] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:27:48] Monogamous?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:27:49] Yes, I know. I don't know if you finished reading no More Goodbyes, but there are a number of. Okay, you may like this story I tell my friend. His name, Sakoki. He took that name from, I think it was Tahiti that he went on a mission. That was his mission name. And he used it the rest of his life. Sakoki, he and his partner Richard, who had their. They met in the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:28:21] Richard was Methodist, I think Lutheran. Sokoki's long history of Mormon, his state patriarch, father Relucian High present mother. All the family came to the. The commitment ceremony about, I don't know, 15, 18 years ago of Richard and Sokokie, these two beautiful men who deeply love each other.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:28:47] They have since married legally when it was available in California. Just, I think prior to when I was doing no more goodbyes. And I contacted after I had met him a long, long, long time ago. And I said, cokie, are you and Richard still together? He said, of Course we are. Why do you ask that? They had been together about 18 years up to that point and he and Richard were going to come up to Northern California and so they dropped in to see me and I fed them and we talked and had a wonderful, wonderful time. And they were just so sweet together and had this little moment of somebody disagreed on something and they were just so sweet about it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:29:37] And I just adore these two men. So that was that evening. But then a couple of days after that I was visiting with a friend of mine in my ward who's telling me about her in laws who they're both Mormon temple workers but they arrange their temple schedule so they never have to see each other in the temple because they hate each other so much.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:30:15] Okay, so I'm looking at that couple and I'm looking at Richard and Sakoki and I'm saying where is true love here? Where is kindness and joy and delight in being with each other? So yes, I know. And you're going to interview somebody else who is in the book there in Oakland, Who's our biology professor that you, Bill Bradshaw.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:30:54] I tell the story in there of Brett Bradshaw and his partner who live in Oakland. Well, they're married now and they are raising this darling little girl. They have been together for quite a long time. They are deeply happy, have a rich relationship other in there guy Berryessa and Trey, his partner. They are, I tell of them adopting this little girl who happened to be a little black baby who was a drug baby and they stayed with her in intensive care for a while while they were able to adopt her. She is this delicious girl who's now about 10 or 12. Yes, I see these little families who deserve to be honored.

John Dehlin [03:31:48] And for that middle aged man or woman or young or whoever who's fearful that they might end up like Gerald vs. Sokokie. Any tips or tricks or advice you've learned to help them them end up more like Sokokie.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:32:08] No, only listen to the best that is in you. You know, maybe the first step that all of us need to take in so many of these issues that we deal with is to make a decision that the answers are inside of us, that we listen to everybody else out here, everybody. And then we know that finally we have within us the relationship with our heavenly parents and the inner wisdom of our soul that we can know what path is really best for us. And not best in any kind of immediate gratification kind of sense, but a path that is best in being truest to who we believe Ourselves really to be.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:33:01] And that feels to be a path of love and joy and being able to be the most honorable person that we can be. And everybody has that within them. They don't need me to tell them anything except to remind them that that is inside of them.

John Dehlin [03:33:27] Okay, a couple more quick ones. The young man who has decided that he can't marry a heterosexual spouse, but he or she cannot leave the church and thus has decided they're going to make their life as a sacrifice on the altar to God and to live without intimacy. Any advice or thoughts for that young man or woman?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:34:02] No, there are. I'm thinking of several that I know. A dear man, but I just saw the other day, that I've known for years and years and years, has never totally gay, has never had a romantic embrace from either a man or a woman.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:34:28] And he has done everything the church has way and he feels that he's made the best decisions for himself, for what he needed. He's held, you know, reasonably high positions in the stake and people probably know that maybe he's gay, but everybody loves him anyway. And nobody brings that up. That there are cases like this everywhere. And this is not my business to say that this is a wasted life. This, this person has had a rich life of relationships with a lot of family and a lot of friends and a lot of contribution.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:35:09] And the Sali Tribune did an article about what my stake did that I just explained a little while ago and it profiled one of the members who is an out gay man who has made. He'd made the decision to leave his gay partner and back to the church. He was interviewed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:35:36] He works in a responsible position in the church and that is the life that he has chosen and he deserves to be respected for that life.

John Dehlin [03:35:49] Some gay advocates, I don't know how to describe them, when we talk about an issue like this, they get really animated and upset that it turns people into a shell of a man or a woman. It deprives them of something that's as fundamental as the air we might breathe or the water we drink. And that it's just a cruel thing to ask of somebody.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:36:19] Well, that's a really difficult. You know, that's sort of the basic knot of all of these threads that we're talking about here. It comes down to this knot of are we going to give. Are we going to give people permission or encourage people to follow what they feel in this particular way?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:36:47] I'm a little bit. What I'm trying to get at, I think here is that Certainly one's sexuality is a very, very deep part of who all of us are. It's not necessarily the only part, but it is a very profoundly deep part.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:37:06] And I would feel that for most people and you know, there are always exceptions, but for most people that is and will continue to be an aspect of themselves that they want to celebrate and that they want to find a relationship in which that truly is celebrated.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:37:31] And we know as we watch history move forward, I don't believe any of us expect people to go back in the closet. That is not the way history moves. And from what I'm observing, there will be more and more gay people within our church and without who are feeling as has not happened in many, you know, way, way decades past, but is happening now, that they can discover who they feel themselves authentically to be and find a way for that to be respected in a relationship that feels right to them. We are going to see that happening more and more for our LDS people as well as others. And that is the challenge in the church of how is the church going to respond to that?

John Dehlin [03:38:33] And is it fair to say that just like you would tell a young couple who's considering marriage that the odds are against them, that you wouldn't recommend the high probability of success, although it's

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:38:47] up to them to a mixed marriage couple, gay and straight?

John Dehlin [03:38:51] Yeah. So just like you admitted that the odds are against them, would you tell a young, single gay person that the odds of ending up fulfilled and joyful without ever sharing it to mistake with anyone, that the odds are against them as well?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:39:11] No. I mean, everybody. It's a gamble for everybody to navigate this whole thing of relationships, but each individual is, you know, very, very different story. And I would have to say, as I have said that I certainly know very happy heterosexual couples. I know happy homosexual couples. And I can only say, you know, within yourself with the direction that you get from God, the path that you should take. Not to say that there's gonna. That all. There will always be a happy pot of gold at the end of whatever journey. Plenty of relationships of whatever kind are just not going to make it

John Dehlin [03:40:13] or not.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:40:14] Yeah. But for everybody that draws seems to be almost universal to attempt to find a relationship where emotionally and physically there can be a celebration together that's not going to end. Everybody, almost everybody has that within them. And so it's a messy business. All these paths are pretty messy and fraught with, With. With landmines. But we travel them and we need to support each other as best we can while we travel.

John Dehlin [03:41:05] How about to the parents who have found out their kid's gay? What's the advice to them? It's pretty simple, I guess.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:41:17] Do not for a moment withdraw your love from this child. Remember that this child is the same little baby you loved when he was in your arms. The same high school student that you were proud of when he brought home his report card. The same college student that did well in whatever is so charming and good and such a good part of your family.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:41:42] You just remember he is the same, he or she are the same person they were before. You have this new piece of information of another thing about them now. I'm telling you this is where our society and I'm saying our Mormon society fails so miserably.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:42:03] Okay, just two days ago a woman people approached me all the time to say, oh Sister Pearson, can I teach? So her sister and the sister's husband were just given the information that their 20 something year old son is gay.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:42:21] They are both just basket case. The mother came to Utah, doesn't want to go home. She's just can do nothing but just cry. The father has recently been put in as a stake president. Upon hearing about his son being gay, he said, I'm going to have to resign from my stake president. I said, what? What? But that's where many people still are. I have failed with my family.

John Dehlin [03:42:57] Not resign from stake presidency to support the child resigned because this must mean they were a failure as a parent and aren't fit to be a church leader.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:43:11] Here's the response of this. I mentioned him in no More Goodbyes, this young man that I've told him I would put him on my visiting teaching list and I call him every month. Some years ago his parents pretty much disowned him and his sister repeated to him a conversation with the mother saying, well, I guess we should be better to so and so, but he's not going to be with us in the next life anyway.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:43:37] That's an unusual extreme. But in between that extreme and the story such as I tell in there where the parents upon hearing that their son is gay, a letter from him, take the next plane to fly back to hold him and tell him that nothing will ever change in the way they love him. Between that extreme and this other extreme, there is all this wide arena where there's a lot of pain, way too much pain, you know. And in that conversation I mentioned a little bit ago where I conversed with this particular general authority and I said, you know, we Mormons are so big on preparedness I've got wheat in my garage.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:44:22] Most of us have something. Few of us will be wiped out by a fire or a flood. But a predictable number, if we say maybe close to 5%, are essentially gay, that means what? 5% parent up, 5% mother up, couple of siblings.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:44:41] Every family, if you get out to a cousin, aunt, uncle, every family has at least one gay person in it. And what do we give these parents when they find out that they have a gay child? To some of them, it is worse than if they had a fire or a flood.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:45:03] But they reach into the little backpack that we've given them and maybe they pull out an old copy of the Miracle of Forgiveness, which Elder Kimball said later he wished he had written differently. But maybe they have that, and that's maybe all they have.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:45:25] And to this particular general authority said, now, Sister Pearson, that is something I can take and talk to the other brethren about. We need to prepare our families with better information about all this. So, anyway, it's a very.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:45:42] I know that history moves slowly, but there are moments in history where things have to just happen and people have to unitely stand up and say, no more.

John Dehlin [03:45:58] What about to the young man or woman that's thinking about taking their life? What would you tell them?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:46:05] I would say your life is precious. Your life is supposed to be lived here and now. No matter what anybody has made you feel about your life, whether it's your parents, whether it's your church, whether it's your interpretation of scripture, no matter what it is, please put that away.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:46:28] You can do well. Okay, here's something I say frequently. You can help the cause of making things better for gay people so much more if you will stay here and shine than if you take your life and go.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:46:45] Now, there's a chapter in there where I speak to the phone on. I speak on the phone to somebody who has his suicide date picked out. And I called him, and as I write there, I said, at first I was sympathetic, and then I got mad and I said, don't you dare do this to me. Don't you dare do this to the rest of the team. We're on this team together, trying to figure out a better way for gay people and their families to exist in this society and for you to take the coward's way out.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:47:19] What would that do to your children? That give them one more reason to think of you as a loser? I said, the only thing you are called to do is to stay in this life and be the best human being you can be and shine as brightly as you can shine.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:47:35] And you know what he did that suicide? I visited with him when I next came to Utah, and on his suicide date, I called him on the phone and he answered. And no, he's still on the team. And we speak from time to time, and he's still on the team.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:47:54] So I guess I would say to everybody, don't let anything or anybody dictate the value of your life. You know, I know that. So far in July, there have been three LDs gay suicides in Utah, one of which had fair amount of publicity.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:48:14] That's a terrible thing. And people who do that are not in their right mind at the moment. We know that, and we know that they have been fed lies about who they are that have put them in that position. We have to stop feeding them those lies and give them more nourishment of who they really, really are, open our arms to them more, and then just say, we need you. We need you here to help make things better. Stick around and work with us.

John Dehlin [03:48:51] So in typical fashion, we've covered men, we've covered blacks, we've covered gays. And of course, the group that's always last to be covered, whether it's in civil rights or in Mormonism, is women.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:49:09] Oh, that's okay. We don't need anything anyway.

John Dehlin [03:49:13] Doormats. What was it?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:49:14] Oh, never mind. I don't want to think about it.

John Dehlin [03:49:18] You could do five hours on women, you wrote.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:49:21] Oh, I could do weeks, you wrote.

John Dehlin [03:49:23] Pick up that book right there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:49:25] Well, yeah, see, I was born into women's issues, and then I married into gay issues. And these are stepsisters, you know, I mean, true sisters. So, yes, much of my. Well, all of my work has had a running theme of empowering women. And. Here's a poem that I really. Here's two poems that I really like. No, I'll just share one of them. And really, I have received so many letters. Right now we're dealing more with the gay issues. But, you know, 15 years ago or so, I was. Everything I was getting was, you know, a lot of women's tremendous angst from women trying to figure out how to be a woman in the patriarchy. And that's sort of quieted down now.

Mormon Feminism and Reclaiming the Divine Feminine

John Dehlin [03:50:25] Where'd those women go?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:50:27] Well, they're on the Internet now. You want to go to Mormon feminist housewives? I don't really. I don't take the time to visit. I'd love to visit all the blogs, but I don't. Okay. Power. When she learned that she didn't have to plug into someone or something like a toaster into a wall. When she learned that she was a windmill and had only to raise her arms to catch the universal whisper and turn, turn, turn, she moved. Oh, she moved and her dance was a marvel. Now, that's sort of what I was saying.

John Dehlin [03:51:13] Read the other one. Oh, unless you don't want to.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:51:16] Well, no, no, I can't. We just.

John Dehlin [03:51:19] I'm thinking about my wife and daughters, and they're already in tears. So if you've got a second one.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:51:23] Well, okay, give us some more position. If A looks up to B, then by nature of the physical universe, B must look down on A. Rather like two birds positioned, one on a tree and one on the ground. Or so thought Marjorie, who had always wanted to marry a man she could look up to to, but wondered where that would place her. If she did, imagine her astonishment when she met Michael and found that together they stood physics on its head. You could never draw this on paper, for it defies design. But year after year they lived a strange arrangement that by all known laws could not occur. She looked up to him and he looked up to her.

John Dehlin [03:52:18] That is good stuff.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:52:21] Lots of good stuff. Okay, this is Beginnings and Beyond. This is the compilation that includes most of the poems from the early books and from another poetry book called Women I have Known and Been. That is more of my edgy women's stuff.

John Dehlin [03:52:35] The hair is standing up on my arms after those poems.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:52:38] We like that.

John Dehlin [03:52:38] I don't, like, read poetry.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:52:41] Well, honey, maybe you should. Okay, now maybe. Maybe. My two major powerful women's poems are two longer narrative poems. One called Millie's Mother's Red Dress, that would take too long to read here, but that one has had huge impact. You get on the Internet and you just punch into Google the red dress. Millie's mother's red dress comes up all over the place.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:53:13] I met a woman who bought this red dress and she never put it on. And then another one called the Steward that I wish we had time to read about. Heber, who took care of his lands and did not take good care. I mean, made sure that his lands produced, but did not take the same care of being a steward over his wife. And she put her violin away. And decade after decade, even though she says, I would have gotten up at 4, I could have done it when she was asked to be in the little community orchestra.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:53:58] And do you know what? And that poem, Millie's Mother and the Steward, have had a big impact in a lot of people in the church.

John Dehlin [03:54:06] I'VE heard the second Debya.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:54:08] And you know, years ago, I remember a Saturday night, my phone rang and it was Dallin Oaks. This was before he was, before he was an apostle. And he said, carolyn, I need to find that poem of yours about the woman with the voice violin. I need to read it tomorrow morning at priesthood meeting. So I told him where to find it. And that poem has been really useful for a lot of people. So yes, I came here to do work for women. And I can't say I got sidetracked because it's been such a privilege to be able to be a blessing to some people to whom I know I have been a blessing. But we are not also in the promised land regarding women as we are not in the promised land regarding gay people.

John Dehlin [03:55:07] What would the promised land look like?

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:55:09] We. It would, it would look more like a partnership. And I recently quoted somewhere Hugh Nibley wrote, he gave a talk called Patriarchy and Matriarchy. And one time I was visiting with him about some of my historical work around women. He said, oh yes, that's the matriarchy. We all know about the matriarch. I said, excuse me, Brother Nibley, we don't all know about the matriarch.

John Dehlin [03:55:35] I've never heard that word.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:55:35] Oh yes, it preceded the patriarchy. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now there's a lot of argument about, I mean the. There was never really a matriarchy that was the flip side of what we know as patriarchy. But there were civilizations that were female centered and that were much more peaceful than the ones that we know now. So the promised land, I hope, will have a new name. I hope it will be called partnership.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:56:01] I don't respond well to the word patriarchy. Even though I have so many good men in my life. I cannot complain personally about how men have treated me. But I do not like the word patriarchy. And I believe that there is a system that we can call partnership that is so much more humane and advanced. You know, Jesus was such a revolutionary.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:56:34] He upset every social mortal of the time. And he well, I have a wonderful article. Jesus was a feminist written by a Catholic man. And Jesus was a feminist in terms of breaking all the taboos about women were supposed to be able to do and all that.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:56:53] So yes, women have the vote. Yes, women can now pray in sacrament meeting. Thanks to Sonia Johnson and whatever. And there are a lot of.

John Dehlin [03:57:03] Most of my listeners will not know that Prior to the 1980s, women in the LDS Church were not allowed to pray in sacrament meeting.

John Dehlin [03:57:09] True.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:57:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:57:11] And most will not have considered the fact, because I didn't consider it until a couple weeks ago, that to date, as I understand it, a woman has never prayed in General Conference.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:57:23] True or not, I don't know that I had never thought of that. But that indeed may be. And see, I love to. I don't want to strike terror in the hearts of anybody about, oh, this raging feminist. I don't know why today a lot of women or young girls or whoever thinks that the name feminist is a bad word. I think it's a wonderful word.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:57:52] And. I like a quote from the writer Virginia Woolf, who said, men and women are different. What needs to be made equal is the value placed on those differences. We don't yet do that. We don't yet place equal value on those differences.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:58:15] And to me, it comes down to ground zero. Is God how we envision God. And as long as we envision God the source of our being as only masculine, we are injured. We are just half of what we can be.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:58:42] And to give this little crumb to women saying, well, we know that somewhere there's a heavenly mother. I find that very insulting because it does not invite me into any nourishment about my femininity being of value to have all that hidden.

John Dehlin [03:59:06] So

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:59:09] the work that I have done, the major work that I have done for women, is this one woman play called Mother Woe of the Morning, in which I play 16 women throughout history in search of God, the mother.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:59:25] I started this in. I first did it in 89, and I did it. I presented this play over 300 times nationally and a couple of times internationally. And it was a huge thing for lots and lots of people. And its theme is the human family in prehistory, only knowing the concept of the goddess, and then how that was lost.

Carol Lynn Pearson [03:59:58] Similarly through Greece, through Egypt, through the biblical cultures, and then how we see the very worst of it in the burning of the witches and people still clinging to a need for the divine mother that shows up here and here and here and here. And I have Emma Smith as one of my characters, and I just end up with an invitation. Mother, we have missed you. Welcome home. Because a lot of people today, you know, a lot of religions are revisioning their concept of God. And this is what I meant when I said a little bit ago we could have been in the forefront of that. We've had this little gem. We've kept it hidden. No, no, no, no. Don't talk about that.

John Dehlin [04:00:48] For over 150 years.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:00:49] Oh, yeah. But now we are of the last wagon. We are Mormons are of the last wagon. You know, except there are plenty of religions that are also really tailing along who do not care to envision anything about a feminine part of God. But so many religions have actively considered how do we bring back or how do we bring into our worship and how do we. How do we invite the women in our culture, congregations to feel represented as we discuss God. My church doesn't do that. But to me, that is as important as any of the work I could possibly think of having doing for gay men. And there are many women who. The thought never crosses their mind that there might be more for them in terms of this.

John Dehlin [04:01:51] They're happy, absolutely.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:01:54] But there are a lot of women who are hurting. And I venture to say, John, that even the women among us who say, I don't need that, we don't understand how much richer our spiritual lives would be if we did have it. We've never known it, so we don't miss it. And it's just, just in the air that we breathe that patriarchy is what has always existed. But that's not the case. And so this work that I have done that is, it is now on a dvd. At the time that I did the dvd, it was given an award as one of the top 25 videos by book list. And it's available from my website, clpierson.com all of this stuff that I have really is there. Oh, yeah. And if we had four more hours, I'd give you a few little readings from this play. I love this play.

John Dehlin [04:02:53] Is there one that you can think of?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:02:54] Oh, I don't know. I was just flipping through a minute. I was always so relieved when I came to.

John Dehlin [04:03:06] Did you memorize the whole thing at one point?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:03:07] Oh, of course. Of course I did. This was a two hour play that I performed out there with props and a trunk and a beautiful white costume that I would change the costume pieces as I went from woman to woman.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:03:24] It was a major event. I started it in Walnut Creek and I rented our small theater there, 120 people or seats or so, for two weekends. Yeah, two days, two weekends. And I filled up those seats and then I started adding more and more and more and more. And then my radical women friends in Utah of the Mormon Women's Forum wanted me to bring it here. So they did the groundwork and I brought it here. Scheduled 15 performances, I think ended up doing 30.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:04:03] And it was, it was quite an event at that time. Okay, here's Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who Said, we have got to bring back God the mother. How does she start here? Okay,

John Dehlin [04:04:19] pause. I'm sorry. First of all, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a women's rights.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:04:25] Oh, yes, she was the orator. She and Susan B. Anthony were very close friends and sort of two of the brightest lights of the suffrage.

John Dehlin [04:04:36] And we're talking late 1800s right now.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:04:38] Yeah, about 1880, something like that.

John Dehlin [04:04:40] Was she contemplating a mother in heaven, or is this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:04:43] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin [04:04:44] So this isn't you. Oh, no. Imposing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:04:46] Oh, no, I'm not. No.

John Dehlin [04:04:48] This historical.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:04:49] Almost everything I take here is from. There's a book called Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Bible or something where it's really a commentary that she goes through, makes comments on the Bible and. Oh, no, she's determined that there is God the mother and that we have to bring back God the mother. So this. How do I start this? I say, now, are there any questions, please?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:05:17] Yes. The gentleman in the back of the hall, Mrs. Stanton, he says, tell us about the new Bible you and the devil have written. I must disappoint the good gentleman. What I have written is only a commentary on the Bible. And it was written, sir, by Ellen, Louisa, Ursula Francis and myself. His Satanic Majesty was not invited to the committee.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:05:42] The Bible, ladies and gentlemen, has been made authority for the grossest wrongs, from war and slavery to polygamy and the subjection of women. Even the beating of a wife every fortnight with a horsewhip. Well, I wrote an article last winter on that new amusement, the bicycle. And many timid souls were greatly distressed. Should women ride.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:06:08] What are God's intentions concerning woman and the bicycle? Well. And she goes on and on, speaking to this crowd of women. And toward the end, she says, the gentleman at the back of the hall expressed the opinion that woman always has been and always will be in subjection.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:06:32] My dear conservative friend, wipe the dew from your spectacles. She enjoyed unlimited freedom for many centuries until man gained the upper hand. But new forces are gathering. And soon man and woman will reign as equals on earth as the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother reign as equals in the heavens.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:07:02] Now, those are not my words. Those are Elizabeth's words. And so many of these interesting women who cling to or yearned for the concept. I mean, gentlemen, think about it. If it all were reversed and everybody spoke of God in terms of. If you're turning on the radio all of a sudden she's got the whole world in her hand, the shock would be so enormous.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:07:34] But we are so conditioned to thinking of God only as masculine. But I ask you to turn it around and see how would you feel if the source of all our being divinity is always portrayed as masculine? If it were portrayed as feminine, men would not sit still.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:08:01] But the only answer is, obviously it's both. And don't talk to me about 25 million mothers in heaven back there nursing all their babies on Kolob. When I think of God, I'm comfortable thinking of the divine couple. And sometimes in my prayers, I establish God the Father here and God the Mother there. And I ask them to put their hands on my head and I receive whatever blessing they have for me. There is no way in the world I can conceive of a God that does not represent femaleness as much as maleness.

John Dehlin [04:08:42] So why have we walked away from that as a church? Like, talk about 60s Exponent 2. I can talk about it, but something started happening in the 60s. You clearly helped something happen in the 70s that led to the late 80s. And I'm telling you, what you just read clearly struck fear in the hearts of the brethren in the late 80s. And this culminates in the early 90s when I'm at BYU and Gail Houston and Cecilia Farr, I know, are starting to talk about Mother in Heaven vocally. This group called v voice BYU, which is, you know, women empowered, having a voice starts gathering, and before you know it, the boot heel is on the neck of any discussion of Mother in Heaven. Gail Houston is dismissed. Cecilia Farr is dismissed.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:09:37] I know that. I know.

John Dehlin [04:09:38] And the September 6th are excommunicated, which included four feminists. Lavina Fieldy, Anderson Whiteley, Maxine. Maxine. And.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:09:48] Yeah, no, I know all that.

John Dehlin [04:09:51] And Margaret Lehman.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:09:51] I know all that. And that's part of my enormous grief.

John Dehlin [04:09:55] Were you watching as that was happening? Oh, yeah, September 6th and all that. But you somehow escaped it, Right?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:10:02] And of course, I had moved to California by then.

John Dehlin [04:10:05] Did those ladies get a little bit resentful or frustrated when you got off the hook?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:10:11] I don't know. I have heard one of them say, I don't know why Carolyn Pearson hasn't been excommunicated. But, yes, I grieve.

John Dehlin [04:10:23] Did that make you sad? Did that whole thing make you sad?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:10:26] Oh. Oh, my, yes, it was awful. It was just awful.

John Dehlin [04:10:34] Because it seems like you were trying to be true to Joseph Smith in terms of doctrine that he brought to light.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:10:43] Yes. Yes, he did. And today's brethren do not discount that. Joseph did say that, and therefore there must be a Mother in Heaven. But there's nothing scriptural about her. And we don't know anything about her, so we're not going to talk about her.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:11:02] And do you remember at one of the women's meetings when President Hinckley made the statement, we understand that there are some people who are interested in, who are starting to pray to a mother in heaven this will not happen.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:11:15] And he just. But you know what? The General Relief Society presidency sat there and heard that for the first time, as he said to everybody, there was no consultation with them about what does this mean? Mean, why do some of our people. Let's talk about this.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:11:33] There was a tremendous response of fear by the established patriarchy to what they perceived as a threat. Now, this was all involved in feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment and Heavenly Mother. And all of these things became one block of Satan is trying to destroy the family.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:11:57] If you want to read Pedestals and Podiums, Martha Sontag Bradley's book, which I only read this year, of the terrible scene that happened in Utah during the Year of the Women, the Year of the Woman when the Equal Rights Amendment was happening and each state was to send a delegation to Texas for this next step of things that is so embarrassing. And I had to write by the margin as I read every few pages, just like Prop 8. Just like Prop 8.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:12:35] Don't bother to read the issues. Just follow the brethren. And so this most embarrassing thing happened where the woman's meeting that was scheduled in the Salt palace to have delegates from everywhere and women from all different ideals and all different religions and races, and they tried for a lot of diversity to invite women to come to the Salt palace for this meeting where they were to talk about and vote on the various issues that were developed around all this nationally.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:13:16] And about. They were expecting about a couple, I forget, several thousand women. They were expecting, I think maybe up to 4,000. And then this huge fear took over. And the bishops were instructed to send by the busload women to come to this conference.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:13:43] And they were just essentially given to believe that they were to vote no on everything. And everything. The things that happened at that conference are just so shameful of women against women and the fear that anybody who looked like a feminist was sent by Satan to destroy the family.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:14:06] It was just awful. So what you're saying is that in that period of time, fear gripped everything about this shift of giving women more power that is somehow an inroad on patriarchy, and we can't have that. And so, as you have said, it was shut down.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:14:34] I attended a meeting of the Women's Mormon Women's Forum. A few years ago, Lavina Fielding Anderson pronounced Mormon feminism dead. But you see, there's always a little different story going on underneath that. And on the Internet, there's quite a bit of feminist talk going on.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:14:55] And by and large, women are going about their business, making decisions as they want to without asking permission. And there are a lot of Mormon couples who are working out a partnership the way that they want to, the way that makes sense to their lives.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:15:11] But to me, ground zero is still God the mother. And until we give our girl children God the mother along with God the Father, I believe we're doing a tremendous injustice.

John Dehlin [04:15:31] What are some things that might be done that could move the needle culturally or policy wise? Have you ever stopped? I'm not asking you to tell anyone what to do. I'm just trying to envision how things could be different. Allowing prayers to happen where both are addressed. Is that having more songs written that would talk about it, trying to invent narratives that could explain.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:16:05] Mormon in general needs permission from the top to do anything like that. Now, you know, you have some renegades like me, some mavericks who will do things that they're not called upon to do, but feel called upon to do.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:16:23] But, you know, real change only happens when there's enough, when there's a groundswell at the bottom that insists on the change. And in general, across the world, the position of women has shifted such a lot in the last century, in the last few decades.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:16:52] So change has happened in a lot of spheres and in personal lives, but how to do that institutionally and in Mormondom, I don't know. You know, I just do my own little thing. And. And in my private prayers, of course, I envision Father and mother. I would not embarrass my bishop or stake president by doing an unconventional prayer in one of the official meetings.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:17:28] But I am known in my Relief Society to raise my hand frequently and remind us, well, okay, so just this last January, so we start this new text, and the first lesson is about. Well, the first or the second is titled Heavenly Father. And I did not know this. One of my friends, the Mormon Housewives.

John Dehlin [04:17:56] Feminist Mormon Housewives.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:17:57] Yeah. Feminist Mormon housewives told me to examine this lesson in the new version of the text that's called Gospel doctrine, with the version of the text called Gospel Doctrine that for, I guess, 10 or more years was used.

John Dehlin [04:18:18] Oh, is this Gospel Essentials? Gospel Essentials. I'm not trying to correct you. I'm just making sure I know what book you're talking about.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:18:24] I believe that both of them were entitled gospel doctrine. Okay, okay. I don't have in physically that one, but I did compare. They had the same. Essentially the same lessons all the way through. Very same, but with some changing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:18:44] In the old one that had been used for 10 or more years, there were about 11 references to our heavenly parents throughout. In the new one, as of this year, there is one sentence that says, we are all children of heavenly parents. But then every reference after that is Heavenly Father.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:19:08] And as I studied that, I thought, okay, I can pretty much overhear the conversation going on in correlation as to why we should do that. You know, we have a lot of new members, and it's kind of confusing to talk about heavenly parents, and maybe we should just, you know, simplify and da, da, da. Which, of course, that gets the vote to the detriment of the spiritual needs of women or of men need their mother as much as women need their mother.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:19:40] So women have lost ground in a variety of ways in terms of that kind of thing. Oh. So excuse me, just remembering here what I'm saying. So in my Relief Society, when we had that lesson in January, at the end of the lesson about Heavenly Father, or during it, I raised my hand. And the women in a Relief Society love to have me raise my hand because I always say something, never way out of line, but always moving things in just a little different direction.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:20:25] And so I stood up and I said, sisters, I just need to make sure that every woman in this room understands that we are so limited by our language and that as we sit here and talk about God as our Heavenly Father, we need to know that we, every one of us, has been brought here by a divine couple that is as much mother as father. That's terribly important to me, that all of us keep that well in mind.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:21:02] And after that meeting with some woman, I didn't even know her, she came up. I'm so glad you stepped out in Relief Society. I get so tired of everything being about the men. So I do my little part.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:21:20] So where this will all end up in Mormondom, I don't know. As I sit in church and sing the hymns, I am wont to change pronouns around. I don't do this for deity. When I sing a hymn, I don't consider that to be appropriate, but I do on things like the faith of our fathers. And I sing pretty loud.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:21:43] And a couple years ago, I remember I was sitting by a young man in a sacrament meeting. I knew him. I'd forgotten who it was, but I wasn't close to him. But we were sharing a hymnal and I was singing Faith of Our Mothers.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:22:00] And by the time we finished singing, he was singing along with me. Faith of our Mothers. You know, if everybody said, hey, where's our mother? But, you know, we're all so generally so complacent, let somebody else do the thinking for me.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:22:26] And you know, as we went through this awful Prop 8 battle and one of the arguments was every family has to have a mother and a father. I thought, oh please, we can say that. Yes. But in my spiritual family, I am given not just two dads, I'm given three dads, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and not a mother in sight.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:22:54] That is what I call the motherless house that I have written a poem about that I refer to a lot in this play. We Mormons and many other religions live in a motherless house. And I personally do not believe that any of us even grasps the kind of damage that does to both women and men spiritually.

John Dehlin [04:23:22] So this has been wonderful. It's now time for what I like to call the Lightning Round, where I'm going to pepper you with all the biggest, hardest, toughest questions at the end that I wrote down at the end of the book when I wrote my notes. We're down to here, but I'm going to begin by asking you to tell us what are some of the most important Carolyn Pearson works that we are probably not familiar with, that we should become familiar with or a sampling of the many.

Reflecting on Her Major Works and Legacy

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:23:59] Certainly Mother Wool of the Morning is terribly important. My major, major works, my two books, no More Goodbyes and Goodbye I Love youe. Those are the major things that I think my life will have contributed. But there are so many other things that. Do you know what? This little book just came out. I write humor books as well. You didn't know that, did you?

John Dehlin [04:24:29] I could have guessed it.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:24:31] This is called In Dog Years I'm Dead. And it's just a compilation about funny things about growing older. Such as you know you're growing old when getting lucky means you find your car in the parking lot. An all nighter means you didn't have to get up to pee.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:24:47] So I love. I created a T shirt that is sold in fine places that feature Mormon stuff. A BYU bookstore carries this wheat for man D&C, 8917 chocolate for woman M&M, 24 7. So yes, I have some humorous stuff that people might want to be aware of.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:25:17] My next to last book is this very lovely little book called the Lord is my A guide for couples or Inspiration for couples. And in it I go through the 23rd Psalm looking at all of the, the principles there as to how couples can use them in their relationship of shepherding one another. This is one of my favorite things I've ever done.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:25:41] And this, believe me, would not scare anybody. I have this little series of fables such as the Lesson that looks at life as a series of story problems. This one has been hugely popular. Oh, if we had another four hours, John, I'd love to talk to you about synchronicity.

Synchronicity, Spirituality, and Personal Philosophy

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:26:08] This book was in a hardback, was called Consider the Butterfly. The paperback is called Embracing Coincidence. I think that one of the spiritual tools that all of us have available to us is to watch for these odd little things that come into our lives daily that we say, whoa, that's unusual, or that I just saw that. And then I see this, these little clues along the way of meaningful coincidence. Carol Jung, that was Brigham's brother, you know, the one that didn't come west that coined the phrase synchronicity.

John Dehlin [04:26:49] Oh,

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:26:52] let me just tell you what, this is a most recent one that happened on my plane trip here and oh, I'd love to have everybody read this book. This is 44 of my personal stories of observing and utilizing the synchronicity that comes into my life. Ooh, there's a great one here. Speaking of what we just were called the Mormons, the Hindus and God the Mother.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:27:14] I wish I had time to go over a lot of that with you. So here's a typical synchronicity. I'm in Oakland about to come here. I am sitting just before getting up on the southwest beeline and we're waiting for a plane. I'm reading a novel I brought called Ahab's wife.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:27:36] Really interesting 13 year old girl. We see her going to Nantucket Island. And this page talks about the lighthouse that she sees as they come closer and closer to the island. First this little pencil, then she describes it, gets bigger and bigger. And this lighthouse and the stone house beneath it and here's the ocean.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:27:56] So I get up to run to the ladies room, time to come back to get back in line. And I'm sitting there picking up my book. I suddenly I'm looking right in here and I see a lighthouse. It's a picture on. There's a man standing there with a plastic bag, like for me, probably from a bookstore. And on the outside of the plastic bag is this beautiful picture, full color picture of a lighthouse with a stone house. Right here. And here's the ocean.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:28:30] And above it is a scripture from John, the light that shineth in darkness, about that Thomas Kinkaid. So somehow he's probably bought something that has to do and. But everything is in the timing, the magic of my having read about a lighthouse. Exactly as the one that I see two minutes later on his plastic bag says to me, think about the symbol of the lighthouse.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:28:59] I very seldom get, you know, specific directions, ways to make money, stuff like, I never get that. I only get little clues on how to live. So I think about this lighthouse. What does it mean? Look for lighthouses. You know, don't be lost in the dark. Look for the lighthouse. Be a lighthouse. That's what I get from almost daily, the synchronicities that come into my life. And we all get them, but we don't all notice them. And as Deepak Chopra insists in my introduction here, if you observe synchronicities, not only do you see them more and more, you create them more and more. So this is one of my favorite, favorite subjects. So. All right, John, fire away. What are your last questions to me? I'll try my best to dodge them or to answer them.

John Dehlin [04:29:52] Okay, it's time for the. Those are softballs. Now it's time for the lightning round. Are you ready?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:29:56] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [04:29:57] All right. What would you say to people who would accuse you of being a wolf in sheep's clothing, that you're. That this. That this. And this is all sort of using a sympathetic emotional issue to just sort of unload on the church and to destroy faith, to tear it down. Have you ever been accused of that? I have. I'm just curious if you share that. Maybe not. Maybe even more diplomatic.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:30:27] I have not, to my face, been accused of that. But I know of a few people who have suggested that to a church leader who gave them cause to withdraw their suspicion that I'm a wolf in sheep's clothes. Clothing. But I have no way to defend myself except by my work.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:30:51] If somebody reads anything of mine and it feels to them of the devil, they need to put it away and do what to them feels like the light. I am very suspicious of anybody who says, I know what God wants for you. I am the one who has the answers for you.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:31:21] I love it when people bring their. What light they have and say, if there's anything in what I have learned here that feels good to you, please take it. If it is not, please forgive me if I have offended people along the way. I am sorry for that. I have never intended to do anything but to bless people. And I'm sure I have not always succeeded, but I do not. I know that I am not a wolf in sheep's clothing.

John Dehlin [04:32:02] By what's in your heart.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:32:03] Oh, yes, I know my heart.

Broader Advocacy and Whether to Stay or Leave the Church

John Dehlin [04:32:07] So you, you've taken on gays and women as two special interest groups that have, that have been really important to you that you wanted to kind of be an advocate for. In my small way, I've tried to really get in the place of the disaffected Mormon or the disbelieving Mormon Mormon or the Mormon who's struggling with their faith.

John Dehlin [04:32:30] And in reality, I see a lot of similarities between homosexuality, the journey of a homosexual person in the church, and the journey of someone who is losing or has lost their faith in the church. Everything from it can start early on. You're not quite sure what it is, but then once you start, start feeling it coming on and you start realizing it, you become terrified because you don't know what it's going to mean for you. You may be in positions where it's hard to turn back or turn around.

John Dehlin [04:33:05] If you share things with your spouse, they may abandon you and take the children. If you share things with your ecclesiastical leader, disciplinary action may be taken against you. You're in the closet. You try and pray and fast and do everything you can to make it right, to feel better about the things that are troubling you. And often that just makes you crazy and it doesn't help. So you white knuckle it and stay in the closet for as long as you can. And sometimes that can make you mad.

John Dehlin [04:33:39] But then there's the option of actually coming out, which is terrifying in and of itself, and all these thoughts and orchestrations about how you're going to come out appropriately to people to tell them that you don't believe anymore or not in the way you used to.

John Dehlin [04:33:54] And then if you decide to leave the church, the repercussions that potentially can be directed towards you. For me, there's just a lot of similarities. And I kind of, you know, one of the biggest questions that I get or that I got when I solicited questions for you is how in the world does she stay in the church?

John Dehlin [04:34:22] How in the world, after all she's seen, does she stay in the church? And I'll even make that a tougher, bit of a tougher question sometimes. Sometimes you could kind of look at the church and its mistakes with history and culture, almost like a baseball game and a man that's at bat. You Kind of have three strikes and you're out. And you can kind of say that polygamy maybe was one strike. Where for a while, these men who claimed to be prophets, seers and revelators were telling us that it was God's will that men marry multiple women and that it was a requirement for exaltation for men to marry multiple women.

John Dehlin [04:35:01] And then anyone who didn't marry multiple women would be but at best a foot washer in the celestial kingdom. And Joseph was martyred over polygamy. Utah was created over polygamy. We sacrificed all for polygamy. And then all of a sudden one day, never mind, strike one, maybe there's more strikes. I'll give you a strike too.

John Dehlin [04:35:30] 150 years, blacks are second class citizens in the church. Then one day when the civil rights, you know, 20 years after Martin Luther King started marching on Selma, 20 years after 15, 10 years after the rest of the entire developed world gets a clue as to what proper treatment is, a convenient revelation occurs. Oh, and there's no apology.

John Dehlin [04:36:00] No, you know, no, I'm sorry. Just. We're moving on now. Strike two. Strike three. The way that apparently the Brethren have painted themselves into the corner on the gay issue, it's as if we're having our own new Copernican or Galilean moment where we are now committing actions that in 40 years, 30 years, we are going to have to explain. And when we again have that convenient revelation, is there a point where now that we've gutted the doctrine to where it's now the Gospel's essentials manual, which can be reduced to things like don't get into debt and try and be healthy and be honest. Things that pretty much any Susie Ormond or Dr.

John Dehlin [04:36:57] Phil or Oprah would tell us to do. We've gutted all the rich, most of the rich tradition and doctrines that Joseph and the others have given us. Our culture seems to have been gutted in many ways from the rich cultural things and communities that we seem to be fostering.

John Dehlin [04:37:16] Now what we have left is this small bit of doctrine and then this huge apology that's just hanging over our heads or this huge reversal in proclamation of the family or whatever we've done to cause violence to those who are struggling with homosexuality.

John Dehlin [04:37:34] Strike three. And I would ask you, in a little bit tougher way than maybe others have asked me to ask you, instead of just saying, how do you stay in the church? I would ask, how in the world do the Brethren deserve our loyalty and devotion and respect? Is that A softball?

John Dehlin [04:37:57] Was that.

John Dehlin [04:37:58] Wait, sorry, no. Did I go over the top? Did I go over the top?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:38:03] No. And of course, that corporate question tells more about you than it tells about me.

John Dehlin [04:38:09] No, no, no. I'm advocating on behalf of my listeners. Yes, because you've never had any of those feelings, I'm sure.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:38:18] Oh, no. You know, most of the people who are really, really close to me in my life no longer attend church, and I do not fault them for their decision. Sometimes they're really wary of me for hanging in there. And I'm not going to give you a really lengthy statement. I'm going to give you a short statement.

John Dehlin [04:38:47] Wait for my longest question. You're giving the shortest answer.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:38:49] Yes, I am. I really, really love the Mormon community. And sometimes it makes me mad that it continues to produce the best people that I know of in my life. And my. I'm willing to confess to you and to the listeners here exactly what I confess to my own church leaders, which is that over my whole journey in my life in the church and everywhere else, my cosmology and my theology pretty much comes down to God is love.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:39:44] And as we sing in that little song, where love is, there, God is also. And so even in my most. In my moments when I am most outraged and angry about what I see, I feel that I have to say, look for where the love is.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:40:08] And I believe that wherever true, honest caring and appreciation and love exists in a straight relationship or a gay relationship, that is where God is. And where real love is manifested in Islam or in Judaism or in Catholicism or in Mormonism, that is where God is.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:40:37] And as I look around, I see love in a lot of places, but I cannot deny that I see a lot of love in Mormondom. And that is where I want to focus. That is where I want to do my giving and my taking.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:40:55] And I take a lot of love from the people in my ward and my stake and elsewhere and my family. And I believe that I give a lot of love there. And I believe that I, in particular, have.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:41:14] A function in this tribe of mine because I have been given an unusual position as a writer and as somebody who has experience with the whole gay issue. I believe that I. Well, I know that I have something of a unique position that I have been able to be someone who can help people who are struggling in a way that I have been able to help in a very immediate and positive way.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:41:49] I do not minimize the privilege that I have been given to do that, and I have been given the privilege of doing that. Not as Unitarian, not as a Jewish person, but as a Mormon person. And I am willing to say I see enough love, meaning I see enough of God in this community, which is the community I have been placed in, that this is where I'm going to go to the last.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:42:23] I'm going to go the full journey with my Mormon heritage and my Mormon brothers and sisters. And so far they have allowed me to do that. And I am grateful for that because I know I have caused a little discomfort for some people, but I have been treated very well.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:42:43] And so I would. My wish is that I will be allowed to continue to be part of the community and to give and take the things that to me are vital. And so that's why I'm here.

John Dehlin [04:43:03] First, in Judaism, there are several strains. There's Hasidic or ultra Orthodox. There's Orthodox, there's Conservative, and then there's Reform. You may know more about Reform Judaism

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:43:22] than me a little bit.

John Dehlin [04:43:24] There's a strain of Judaism where it doesn't matter if you believe that Moses really was a historical figure. Moses, the guy who's supposed to have led the Jews out of the Israelis, out of Egypt. Maybe the Old Testament isn't historical at all.

John Dehlin [04:43:43] Maybe God doesn't exist, but it doesn't matter. You're a Jew and you raise your kids in the tradition and you're welcome. And nobody questions your Jewishness. Let's say that there are people who are struggling in their faith. They don't really. They can't buy a historical Book of Mormon. They just can't do it. The DNA evidence says otherwise. They can't buy, you know, a lot of what Joseph Smith did because they find it reprehensible. The bad things they struggle with, to what extent the brethren today really are doing God's will versus 30 years behind the times and masking those eventual changes in a revelation, whatever. They're struggling with women who just can't get behind that God would withhold his power from them.

John Dehlin [04:44:37] So they're saying, leave or not leave? Should I leave? It's a lot like should someone leave a marriage, as we discussed earlier, is there in your world, is there a place for Mormonism, a Reform type Mormonism? Would you make the same, just like the appeal you made to the young man or woman who might be considering taking their life, to the young man or woman who might be considering leaving the church?

John Dehlin [04:45:08] Would you ever dare to make an appeal to them to not leave the church, but to stay and try and be a constructive force within it?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:45:16] Oh, John, I do that all the time when people contact me with all of these issues. And I never say to somebody, you know, that you lead the church. That's your eternal. You're giving up your eternal life. I don't even go there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:45:34] But if there's somebody who says, you know, I am so troubled about this and this and this, and I love so much about the church and I want to, but I just don't feel I have a place, I don't think I can be there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:45:48] Of course, I say, if you want to be in the church and if you're willing to try to be a constructive, good, give and take person in the church, you have a right to be there. And I'm willing to say to them and to you, I don't think that I could be in the church if I were not out of all my closets.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:46:15] I'm out of my closet as a supporter of gay people. I am out of my closet as a supporter of women's rights. In a way that is tremendously vital to me. I am out of my closet in saying I feel that God is bigger than any church, bigger than my church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:46:39] So somebody who, somebody who wants to stay in the church, I feel could be more comfortable trying to be open about some of these things rather than just sitting there and stewing and causing contention or just taking everything in and letting it fester, I would not be able to do that.

John Dehlin [04:47:08] But it's so disruptive to come out. It's disruptive to Everybody. It's disruptive 360 degrees.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:47:20] John it was disruptive to Martin Luther King to do what he did. It was disruptive for Gandhi to do what he did. It was disruptive for Joan of Arc to do what she did. It's disruptive to everybody who says, wait a minute, maybe we need to do things a little bit differently.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:47:40] Why should we not be? Was not early Mormonism disruptive? Did not Joseph Smith disrupt everything? You know, we have a tradition of kind of being disruptive. But not now. Then we could be disruptive, but no, not now. Right now we've got to be, you know, just very, very mild.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:48:08] And I don't know, see all of these, what we're talking about right now is so much bigger than me. I don't have the concepts, the words to even address all of this churning stuff of how we change history or how we feel, how we find our place within an institution that's way beyond my scope. I just know my own little Carol Lynn Wright life that has brought me to this and this and this and this and how I best can feel. I'm fulfilling what I came here to do and to be.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:48:52] And that's all that we can ask of anybody. And people can do that outside the church. People can do that within the church. But I think we do have a right. I think we have an obligation to. When we see pain and do not speak of it, I think that's evil.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:49:20] If I were to see, as I do, all the pain of these gay people and their families and say, well, you know, it's not my business, the brethren will take care of that when they want to, that would be me participating in evil. What is that statement? We all know all that's necessary for evil to triumph is for enough good men or women to do nothing. Before I forget, I want to tell you my poem called Pioneers.

John Dehlin [04:49:55] You have it memorized?

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:49:57] Yes, I do. I still have a few brain cells left. Sometimes I really have to track them down. And unless you have something for me after this, let's just let this be our benediction.

John Dehlin [04:50:13] I'm with you, Sister. Bring us home.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:50:17] Pioneers. My people were Mormon pioneers. Is the blood still good? Truth flew by like a dove and dropped a feather in the west where truth flies, you follow if you are a pioneer. I have searched the skies and now and then another feather has fallen. I have packed the hand card again Packed it with the precious things and thrown away the rest. I will sing by the fires out there on that uncharted ground Where I am my own captain of tens Where I blow the bugle, bring myself to morning prayer Map out the miles and never know where or when or if at all I will finally say this is the place I face the plains on a good day for walking the sun rises and the mist clears I will be all right. My people were Mormon Pioneers.

John Dehlin [04:51:45] Carolyn Pearson, thank you for joining us on Mormon Stories.

Carol Lynn Pearson [04:51:49] Thank you.

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