Break the Silence 

• University of Utah Press

When Kerry Spencer Pray came out as a queer, married Mormon well into her 30s, she searched for accounts from other people who had gone through what she was going through. And what she found was ... nothing.

"When I'd look for other stories," Pray says, "there were no essays, no blogs, nothing. I only knew one lesbian in the entire world. It puts you in kind of a messed-up place."

In a sense, that realization was the beginning of the process by which Pray—a creative writing faculty member at Stevenson University in Maryland—and filmmaker Jenn Lee Smith would ultimately collaborate on the newly-published book I Spoke to You With Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders. The essays represent the experiences of cisgender lesbian, transgender, nonbinary and intersex people raised in the LDS church—many of them anonymous or under pen names, and all of them exploring the struggle of expressing an authentic self when that self is not recognized as acceptable within church teachings.

Pray says it was important to focus on marginalized genders, rather than the experience of cisgender gay men in the church, since that experience had already been documented to a much greater extent. "Cis gay men who come out, they're at least part of the group that still has a voice and is respected within the church," Pray says. "Whoever is in charge sets the agenda, with rules they understand and assumptions they understand, and everyone else gets forgotten. All of the spiritual authority is very white and very male, and those two things together becomes these implicit feeders of everything else—they shape the way everything gets approached."

With few other avenues for exploring a queer Mormon experience that was not cisgender male when she herself was coming out, Pray began investigating early Facebook groups where queer Mormon women would gather. It was there that Pray first met up with Jenn Lee Smith, and where the idea began for gathering stories from queer Mormons outside that cisgender male paradigm. While Smith's initial ideas were for either a documentary film or an academic book, meeting with Pray moved things toward to the creation of the Queer Mormon Women Project, a blog that would allow people to submit essays on their experiences.

"Once we had a big enough collection, that's when we approached a publisher," Pray recalls. "But it's been a six-year process."

Part of the reason that process took so long was intrinsic to the reason it was created in the first place: Those who exist as queer and non-cisgender-male within the LDS church have been taught to keep their voices to themselves, both through the patriarchal church structure and through the risk of ostracism, for themselves or their family members, based on their sexual or gender identity.

"The challenge of this entire project has been, all of these people come from groups who don't necessarily want to say anything," Pray says. "Sometimes it's better not to talk. We did have to do a broader call for papers to specifically ask for more perspectives, and some we weren't able to get. ... There's no benefit [to the writers] in telling these stories; there's only risk. But I think we were able to get a very balanced collection by the end."

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• University of Utah Press

Pray acknowledges that making such a concerted effort towards gathering a wide variety of voices was a learning experience for herself as well, helping to shake paradigms instilled in her by her Mormon experience. "The thing that surprised me the most was how I had been trained to think in binaries so fully, and I didn't know it," she says. "I didn't realize there was this massive variety of experiences that didn't easily fit into boxes. It went beyond male/female, in the church/out of the church, good/bad, in very categorical ways. Life is not like that, and queerness is not like that."

While it might have been possible to approach the creation of I Spoke to You With Silence from a more academic perspective, it was ultimately more important to the writers whose essays they gathered to have a voice in a way they'd never had before. "Jen tried for years to put it together as that social science sort of approach, and the problem was there was just no material," Pray says. "We had to get silent people to be not silent. The conclusion we came to was, before you could draw any conclusions, the stories had to exist. So we wanted to just make them exist.

"The more you tell these kinds of stories, the easier it is to tell them. We put them out there so it's less scary to tell your own stories."