Theatrical plays about/by Gay Mormons
The Salt Lake Tribune
Two new dramas about gay members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - one that played to sold-out houses last month at the University of Iowa and another produced in a well-attended workshop in New York City - suggest there's still artful vigor left in mining the painful collision of faith and homosexuality."I'm glad to see attention brought to this issue from whatever quarter," Carol Lynn Pearson says of the mini-national boomlet of gay Mormon-themed plays. "People of every religion need to take a really strong look at how we are treating our gay brothers and sisters - and what we tell them in the name of God."
The experience of the two playwrights John Cameron, 56, head of the University of Iowa's acting program, and Roman Feeser, 33, of New York City, are separated by more than a two-decade age range.
Cameron served an LDS mission in Guatamala and El Salvador, and performed as a Young Ambassador while attending Brigham Young University. After graduating with a psychology degree, he performed in Mormon musicals, such as "Saturday's Warrior" and Pearson's "My Turn on Earth." He left religion behind in his late 20s, when he began doubting the existence of God, before coming out as a gay man at age 34.
His harrowing, powerful play, "14," was inspired by his experience undergoing electric shock treatment in a 1976 research study at BYU. As a college student, Cameron volunteered for the experiment, conducted by then BYU-graduate student Max Ford McBride, hoping it would alter his same-sex attraction. Instead, the psychological and emotional wounds nearly crippled him, once leading him to contemplate suicide.
Over the course of his life, Cameron says he had tried to forget about the shock treatments and didn't want to talk about it, until he learned from a researcher that two men in the experiment had committed suicide. Later, Cameron reluctantly agreed to be interviewed by a reporter writing about homophobia at BYU in the national gay magazine, The Advocate. As Cameron writes in the play, it seemed the ultimate irony when his account and quotes, due to space limitations, were cut from the magazine story.
In contrast to Cameron's life, Feeser grew up Catholic on Long Island, moving to Manhattan at age 18 to pursue a theater career. He came out as a homosexual and left acting at age 24. Graduate studies in forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice provided the material for his first play, a pseudo thriller.
Reading a May 2000 Newsweek story about the suicide of Stuart Henry Matis on the steps of a California LDS church building was what inspired him to start writing his fourth play, "Missa Solemnis or The Play About Henry." He didn't think he knew any Mormons, although he later found out his writing partner was LDS. One powerful detail he couldn't forget from the magazine story: the image of how the suicide victim's knees were bruised and calloused from praying.
Feeser spent several years researching the story, talking to Matis's friends, relatives and religious leaders, as well as interviewing other gay Mormons. A book-length account of his research, "Latter Gay Saints: The Mormon Church and God's Second-Class Saints," is under consideration at a publishing house.
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