Their voices emerged decades ago.
Long before the courts legalized gay marriage in Utah, they were speaking. Before hundreds of same-sex couples lined up at county clerks' offices in December, they were speaking. They were speaking before rallies for marriage equality drew crowds in the hundreds. Before major corporations proudly advertised same-sex partner benefits for employees. Before Mormons filled more than a city block in the Utah Pride Parade.
They came out in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, taking enormous risks to build Utah's LGBT community and pave the way for change.
These are some of their memories.
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‘So this guy comes in with a sawed-off shotgun.’
As the manager and owner ofThe Sun Tavern, once Utah's most prominent gay bar, Nikki Boyer became the mother hen of an LGBT scene that in the 1970s and '80s was finding its place somewhere between the underground and the open air.
"We had no rights, but we were rich in gay bars," recalls Boyer, now 72. "This is where we felt safe. It was the only place we felt safe. We were afraid to go outside because of the gay bashers."
One night while she was tending bar, a basher came to them. A man burst through the door, brandishing a sawed-off shotgun.
"Immediately about three big women jumped up, grabbed him, grabbed the gun, took him outside, and proceeded to pummel him," she says.
In the early years, she says, an even bigger threat came from bored police officers.
"We were more afraid of the police than we were gay bashers," Boyer says. "They'd drive around on a Saturday night, and if there wasn't any action? 'Let's go down and beat up some queers.'"
Inside The Sun, patrons went for more than food and drinks.
"That was basically the first place people went" after coming out, Boyer says. Many of her customers had lost their families and friends. Some had "internalized homophobia."
Her most haunting memories: "Gays who had undergone 'reparative' therapy." Some recounted shock treatment and induced vomiting while viewing pornography, to create negative associations, she says.
"Their families, the church or their school told them they had to have this," Boyer recalls. At least, she says, that was what she heard from "the ones that could still talk."
"Some of them had lobotomies."
Safety — personal safety, economic security, protection from discrimination — was the most urgent need Boyer could see as she watched LGBT advocacy drift from the underground to organized support groups to outward political action. Boyer balked as marriage went from "not even anything" to a major platform.
"I was one of the people saying, 'Shut up! This is not the issue to push for. Start with anti-discrimination laws,'" she says.
But things changed. Her partner of more than 20 years, Ann Hart, died three years ago. A medical examiner would not release Hart's body to Boyer for a funeral "because I wasn't family." Hart's mother, in her 90s, had to sign a waiver from her nursing home to give Boyer custody. Meanwhile, marriage was happening in other states. It was real. The institution, so long a pie in the sky, was changing attitudes.
"It's going to be easier now," Boyer says. "I can see the dominoes falling."
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‘Don’t rock the boat.’
Michael Aaron was and is a happy warrior.
Coming from a supportive family, he bounded into the University of Utah's LGBT student group in 1982 and whipped up some posters to plaster the town.
"We'd go into the bars, advertising our existence, advertising a conference to get some kind of community involvement, and the people at the bars were saying, 'Don't rock the boat! We've got everything we need here,'" says Aaron, now editor of QSaltLake. "They were very afraid of us coming in and bringing attention to the community because who knew what would happen?"
The fears proved well-founded. Designated drivers in the parking lots of gay bars saw menwriting down license plate numbers. Some Brigham Young University students reported being outed by campus security soon thereafter, Aaron says.
"Then the families ended up finding out they were excommunicated," he says. Even for Aaron's family, who knew he was gay before he came out, the available "support" was punishing to parents.
"It was the mother's fault for being too close, or the father's fault for being too distant: That was the material out there. There weren't role models for parents to point to and say, 'I'll talk to so and so because he's going through the same things.' There was a big transformation that had to happen for a lot of parents to accept this."
Many didn't. Aaron remembers sitting in support groups, bandying about the old theoretical "cure": "If you could take a pink pill that would make you straight, would you? A few would ... because it was so hard. They'd lost their families."
But most said they would not take the pill, opting instead for "this counterculture that was really fun." As the AIDS crisis escalated, a restaurant manager in Bountiful kicked out a gay couple and made a show of throwing out their silverware, Aaron says. The group Queer Nation decided to go out for dinner.
"That group basically filled the entire restaurant," Aaron says. "We made 'em throw out all of their silverware."
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‘It’s like a mask I could take off.’
One night in 1979, in a tiny bar in downtown Salt Lake City, Doug Tollstrup waited backstage and tried to subdue his nerves.
Other people might not be so afraid, he thought. Other people might have grown thicker skin after years of taunting, of threats, of being different, of people screaming "Faggot!" from car windows. Other people even coped with physical beatings, something Tollstrup had sidestepped.
What if performing drag was just one more thing for other people? People who weren't timid and nervous and who somehow managed not to feel completely gutted by ridicule?
For all the hazards of being a gay man in 1979, Tollstrup was most devastated by the insults.
"It hurt my feelings," Tollstrup says. "I had been taught, 'Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me,' and that is so totally wrong. Words can hurt. I just hated people calling me names."
But drag felt perfect. Tollstrup's friend had helped him dress up for a night out, "and I had a ball," Tollstrup says.
"I could put on all that stuff and be somebody different. Then I had confidence because it's not really me," he recalls. "It's like a mask I could take off."
Members of the Royal Court of the Golden Spike Empire, one of Utah's first LGBT groups, which puts on fundraiser drag shows for charities, invited Tollstrup to take to the stage. He bought a wig and a black, ruffled, off-shoulder dress from K-mart — "Oh, my God, it was so ugly, but I just thought it was the cutest thing" — and borrowed a pair of shoes from a childhood friend named Nancy. Tollstrup first steps in heels won Nancy's approval: "You were born in those."
"I guess it's something that's just in me," he says.
But at that debut of what would become a two-decade career, Tollstrup was "a wreck."
The audience applauded politely as his stage name, Clariss, was announced. Linda Ronstadt's "Heat Wave" piped through the speakers.
With one step in Nancy's size 9 pumps, Clariss stomped on every jeer Tollstrup feared.
“You felt so marginalized your whole life,” he says. “All of a sudden, you come out on stage, and they’re clapping for you, and they love you, and you’re like, oh my God. This is wonderful.”
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‘He had a form of therapy he was sure would be successful.’
The chilling legacy of "reparative" therapy in Utah strikes at what may be the No. 1 development in LGBT advocacy: Recognition by science, the public, and even many religions that being gay is not a choice. Widely-reported and documented "treatments" rooted in physical pain and violent thought associations have been rejected by modern psychiatry. But, as Connell O'Donovan looks back on what he describes as "psychologically devastating" hypnotherapy, the bad science is less troubling than the fact that he so desperately wanted it to work.
"I thought it was God's will," says O'Donovan, who was LDS. "I was terrified of spending eternity in hell or the Telestial Kingdom because I was gay."
Reeling from a breakup in 1986, O'Donovan scheduled an appointment with an LDS psychologist who practiced a type of hypnotherapy "he was really sure would be successful," O'Donovan says. The therapist had O'Donovan sit in one of two recliners in the office and instructed him, under hypnosis, to "envision splitting myself into Gay Connell and Straight Connell," he said. Gay Connell sat in the empty recliner, and O'Donovan, as "Straight Connell," was to watch Gay Connell's demise.
"He would have me envision Jesus coming down through the ceiling and trampling Gay Connell to dust. Then the wind would come and blow Gay Connell away.
"It was my body, my identity," O'Donovan says. "There wasn't a Straight Connell there."
O'Donovan says he tried this three or four times. He remembers walking away from his final session, "bawling my eyes out."
The wind picked up and whipped around him as it did in the hypnotic vision.
“I kind of felt like the wind was blowing the dust particles back into me and reassembling me,” he says. “I had an epiphany that I wasn’t going anywhere.”
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‘We were right.’
Becky Moss is an open book.
Being a lesbian was never a secret; she says her parents began discussing the possibility when she was 2. They both were supportive of her relationships. She has been a vocal activist in Utah, hosting a radio program on LGBT issues for more than 20 years.
But Moss won't discuss the bump on her arm.
It's an old scar from a broken bone in a long war whose wounds still feel too fresh. Moss says she's not ready to disclose more details of her assault except to say it was connected to her sexual orientation. Violence, she says, was understood to be the possible cost of her voice, heard weekly on KRCL from 1981 to 2003.
"Back in the day, it was terrifying," she says. "It was common for me to receive postcards in the mail threatening to bomb the station. People on the air made phone calls that were violent, threatening to kill me.
"It became the norm. I became inured to the violence that was being directed towards me. I would joke about it's funny. Then [I'd] go home and throw up."
As gay and lesbian couples picked up marriage licenses this week — casually, like other couples, Moss reflected on the collective battle scars: the beatings, the suicides, the rapes, the missing person reports, the eulogies by disapproving families and religious leaders hoping to expedite her dearest friends to hell.
The courts' decision "means that the fight for LGBT civil rights is real and it's justifiable," Moss says. "We really were right to continue to fight like this."
As she traveled to work on Monday, Moss rubbed her arm.
"But for the first time, instead of rubbing the broken arm, I rubbed the other arm," she says. "There wasn't a break, and I felt whole."
