Introducing the Book Club and Michael Quinn

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is February 2, 2024 and today we are here to plug a book that I can give a full throated, full hearted John Dehlin Mormon Stories podcast endorsement. The book is called Chosen the Memoir. It's got the name D. Michael Quinn on it, but Barbara Brown, Barbara Jones Brown. I think you had something to do with it as well, right?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:00:30] Sure, I published it. My company published it. Signature Books and I edited it and was the lead annotator of it.

John Dehlin [00:00:39] Yeah, your name should be on the COVID then.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:00:41] No, no, no, no, no. All the, all the credit goes to Michael.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] Okay. All right, well, I'm going to be honest. Can I be honest? I'm going to be a little vulnerable. Like I've been doing this stuff for so long, 30 years, whatever. I've read so many books and sometimes as you get tired of Mormonism and Mormon history, and this is a sensitive topic for me because like D. Michael Quinn, one of the church's top historians, I've been excommunicated from the Mormon Church. Like D. Michael Quinn was. I was at BYU when he was excommunicated and I was swimming in that whole deal and it's just really, it's a sensitive and triggering topic for me to be talking about. So I was trying to get out of it. I was trying to talk to Barbara about I don't want to do this. And she's like, I'm going to make you do it.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:01:26] I did not.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] I know she never said that, but those are my words that I heard.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:01:29] I'm glad you decided to do it.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] Yeah. But, but then I started reading it and every single page I've read, there's been just like mind blowing, eye popping information. So I recommend this book for everyone right now. Pause this episode. Go to Amazon or Signature books or drive to your local benchmark books. Buy Chosen Path. You will not regret it. That's my endorsement. Barbara Jones Brown. Welcome to Mormon Stories podcast. Welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:02:00] Thanks for having me on, John.

John Dehlin [00:02:02] Yeah. I am thrilled to have as my co host for the Mormon Stories Book Club, the Rebecca Bibliotheca. Hey, Rebecca.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:02:10] Hey, John. How are you today?

John Dehlin [00:02:12] Welcome back.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:02:13] Thank you so much. Always happy to be here to talk about books, right?

John Dehlin [00:02:16] Absolutely. And host of Mormonish podcast, I should say.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:02:21] Thank you. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:21] Yeah. And we're so delighted. And this is the first time I'm meeting him to have with us in studio. Is it Moshe Quinn? Is that your Last name Moshe.

Moshe Quinn [00:02:31] Moshe Quinn.

John Dehlin [00:02:32] Yeah. And Moshe, tell us who you are.

Moshe Quinn [00:02:34] Yeah. So I'm Michael's youngest child, youngest of four. And I was involved in helping to see this manuscript that we looked at and discovered in a way, after his passing and try to find a home for it, trying to find a platform for people to be able to read his story and see what his life was about and what he thought of it.

John Dehlin [00:03:00] Beautiful. We're so grateful to have you. It's so nice to meet you. Tell us just a couple sentences about kind of who you are, what you do.

Moshe Quinn [00:03:07] Yeah. So I'm an art teacher, have a master's in photography, and I've been teaching art for a while now, almost two decades. I live in the Bay Area. I grew up in Salt Lake City primarily, but also grew up. Half of my adolescence was in Missoula, Montana, with my mom and my brother. But, yeah, I grew up primarily in Salt Lake City and left after high school and moved around a little bit. But I've been in the Bay area for about 18, 19 years now. But it's always good to come back to visit. I still have family in the Salt Lake area, so I do come here once or twice a year.

John Dehlin [00:03:43] And what year were you born?

Moshe Quinn [00:03:45] 1976.

John Dehlin [00:03:46] So that's right smack dab. Leonard Arrington, kind of middle of that stuff, which means you wouldn't probably remember a lot of that.

Moshe Quinn [00:03:53] I was going to say I wasn't keeping tabs on all that at the time.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:03:57] As a toddler.

John Dehlin [00:03:59] Yeah. Well, so nice to have you. I can't wait to have you be a part of this discussion. So thanks to be here. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Barbara. For those who just either have never been Mormon or aren't really plugged in, can you summarize who d Michael Quinn was? Really quick, just so people know why we're even here talking about this guy.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:04:17] Sure.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:04:18] So Michael Quinn will go down in history as one of the leading historians of Mormonism. He started to develop his interest in Mormon history when he was a youngster growing up in Glendale, California, and he started investigating unexplored parts of Mormon history that other historians hadn't necessarily gone into. So, looking at Joseph Smith's early polygamy, looking at whether or not women held priesthood authority, looking at post manifesto polygamy after 1890, when the church publicly stopped its practice of polygamy, but then privately was continuing it in other ways, he wrote about that. So he goes into a lot of topics that were taboo in Mormon history and kind of set the stage for where we are today, talking more about these taboo subjects.

John Dehlin [00:05:09] Tell us where he was educated, because I think that plays into it.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:05:12] So he received his undergraduate degree in English at byu and then a master's degree in history at the University of Utah, and then finally a PhD at Yale University. So highly educated from the best in history.

John Dehlin [00:05:26] Yale is not a crummy school.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:05:29] Not at all.

John Dehlin [00:05:30] As Elder Holland said, it's a pretty good school.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:05:32] It's a pretty good school. And Elder Holland and Elder Holland, who's an apostle for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and D. Michael Quinn were contemporaries. They served in the same mission in England under the same mission president, Marion D. Hanks. And then also they were both contemporaries getting PhDs in. And I think Elder Holland was in history or something similar to that, or maybe it was education. But anyways, they were contemporaries.

John Dehlin [00:05:58] I love it. Okay, so I was supposed to mention this at the beginning. Thank you for joining us for the Mormon Book Club. We do this every once in a while. And I'm gonna let Rebecca tell us what the next book is really quick, and then we'll come right back to this discussion.

Next Book Club Pick and Quinn's Background

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:06:15] Perfect. It's always important to talk about the next book, right? So we are going to be reading Uncultured, and I've been posting about this on our Mormon Stories Book Club Facebook page. You can get more information about that. It's by Daniela Mesteyanik Young. She was raised in Brazil and part of the Children of God cult. It's a really interesting story. We don't have a date yet, but I'm guessing probably about a month from now. I've been in contact with Daniela. She's extremely excited to come on and tell her story. It is absolutely fascinating. So run out, grab a copy, get it on audible, start listening, and we'll be covering this next week or next month.

John Dehlin [00:06:54] Beautiful. Thanks, Rebecca. And check out Mormonish podcast while you're at it. Okay. So, yeah, so D. Michael Quinn is such an important character. I'm going to say that the way I got to know about him was through reading a couple of his books, Origins of Power and Extensions of Power, which really talk about his observations around how power was wielded in the Mormon Church for a couple centuries. Super important stuff. And then the book, Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview. Is that what it's called?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:07:28] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:07:29] He was one of the first to really do groundbreaking research. I mean, we all know about Stone in the Hat now, but he was the one going into the talisman and all of the intricate folk magic stuff that informed Joseph and the Smith family worldview. It's a super important book. That's right.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:07:46] And won the Mormon History Association's best book award award in 1988.

John Dehlin [00:07:50] Nice. Yeah, yeah, I was like a freshman at BYU. Anyway, such important place in history. So Barbara, maybe let's begin just talking about the memoir itself. And I should say I've interviewed Michael on Mormon stories a couple times. Early on I did like a multi hour interview about his life story and. And then later I had him come back to talk about church finances. So. And I knew him a little bit personally too. So what. What would either you or Rebecca or Moshe want to share about his early years that was kind of really popped out as interesting to you from. From Chosen Path, maybe that people should know or would be surprised to know.

Quinn's Coming of Age and Early Years

Barbara Jones Brown [00:08:44] So his early years, meaning his coming of age years. Yeah, Moshe, do you want to talk about that? Because we have been talk. And that was something that was actually surprising for Moshe even as his son. Learning about his awakening sexuality and discovering that identity.

Moshe Quinn [00:08:59] Well, yeah, I mean there are several things that do come to mind, but the most powerful story for me, well, there's two. One has to do with his sexuality and then the other one has to do with his ethnic identity and his father concealing his Mexican American, his Mexican heritage. But yeah, about the sexuality, like for me, like there's a lot that I could say, but there was this kind of like origin point for me in terms of like reading an account of my father's about his, his own life. It was a version of his autobiography that he shared with me and us in the family after our parents divorce.

Moshe Quinn [00:09:35] A couple of years after the divorce, he mailed us this 40 something page autobiography. And I was 12 at the time and I read the whole thing, spent an afternoon digging through it and was really struck by a couple of things. And the one thing that I'll share with you right now is this story that he relates in the autobiography about when he was 12 years old. And as I recall, as he described it in that version of the autobiography, he had maybe some reputation among some people for having fooled around with some boys or done some things along those lines.

Moshe Quinn [00:10:13] And he realized that at this time when he was 12, he really needed to make a choice. Either he could continue exploring his sexuality, his interest in males and in boys, or he could be a Mormon. Now he came from a mixed faith family. His mother was Mormon, his grandmother was Mormon, and the Mormonism really comes from that line. His father, he described always as like a lapsed Catholic, so not really religious.

Moshe Quinn [00:10:45] But he had a lot of influence from his mother and especially his grandmother in Mormonism. And it was really important to him. And at the age of 12, he realized that things had come to a kind of a head and that he had to make a choice between the two.

Moshe Quinn [00:11:00] And he resolved to pursue the path of a good Mormon, serving his faith and serving the church. And this is something that I read, like, within two years of his coming out to me, he came out to myself and my brother. That's actually not right. It's about a year, or maybe within a year of his coming out to me and my brother.

Moshe Quinn [00:11:25] I was just about 11 when he came out to me, and my brother was 13. And that was a really powerful moment for me because of just the intense vulnerability I'd never seen in my father before. He was like. There was just all this body language of extreme nervousness, and he wasn't looking any of us in the eye, and he was kind of stammering, and he didn't really know how to find his words. And I was just transfixed and shocked seeing just that. And then finally when he got to the point of, like, saying, you know, I'm gay.

Moshe Quinn [00:12:05] And that's why. There's more I could say about, like, why this was coming at that time. But when he did share with us that fact, seeing it under this condition of extreme vulnerability, where in a sense, he seemed scared and it seemed like he was a little afraid of our response. You know, it was this position of being 11 years old, and my father is afraid of. Of what I might say or what I might do or how I might react.

Moshe Quinn [00:12:37] So a year after that, I'm reading this biography about how he describes this Choice when he's 12 years old, between being gay and being Mormon. And so I had this. Like this. All this in the background of witnessing his extreme vulnerability and how scared he was and how much I felt for him.

Moshe Quinn [00:12:55] I mean, deeply, in a sense, it maybe strengthened a kind of a bond or connection, certainly understanding him better and feeling a great deal of empathy for him. And it just seemed absurd when I was reading this biography, autobiography, about this choice that he made. Cause it just didn't seem to make any sense to me. Like, why would you have to choose between the two? I mean, of course I understood it, but at the same time, I didn't accept.

Moshe Quinn [00:13:19] Seemed absurd. It seemed like it didn't need to be that way. And there was a sense of indignation that I felt at his having to make that choice or feeling like he had to make that choice. So, yeah, this is something that he covers in this memoir as well. But I really just go back to when I was 12 years old reading an earlier version of his autobiography. That was a really big part of my life growing up and understanding my father in a certain way.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:13:50] Yeah. And then from a historical standpoint, being a historian of Mormonism, what stood out to me about Mike's early years was it was when he was a teenager. And from the ward church building, the library there, he finds a book by Samuel W. Taylor that talks about Samuel W. Taylor's family life living post manifesto polygamy. And that was the first time Mike had ever heard about post manifesto polygamy. He was surprised to hear that Mormons, actually some Mormons, did continue to practice polygamy after the 1890 manifesto that officially supposedly ended the practice of polygamy in the LDS Church.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:14:35] And he's stunned to learn that. And that was his first kind of experience with Mormon history, was learning about something that very few of us know about until he started talking more about it and publishing about it. So it was interesting to me to hear that that was his first early experience with Mormon history, was when he was a teenager in his church building, Church library.

John Dehlin [00:15:00] Yeah. Powerful. Do you want to add anything to that, Rebecca?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:15:06] No, I was just going to say that as we've been reading this in the Mormon Stories Book club, people have just been overwhelmed from page one at just the vulnerability and his true voice. You know, I mean, I'm not sure everyone understood initially that these are his words. You know, they thought, oh, maybe this is some kind of biography. But no, this is Michael Quinn. You can see, sense it through the pages and just the stories that are uncomfortable to hear, uncomfortable to read perhaps, but just completely vulnerable. And so of course, our readers are very interested in. And I think probably you'll get to this question, John. But just the whole process through which why are we holding this book in our hand right now? You know, it was a manuscript you read as a 12 year old. How did it even come to be? Which I think is an incredible story.

Moshe Quinn [00:15:49] Well, and there's a lot to say about that. It's actually kind of a complicated story. I mean, a sketch for me that I feel like is relevant in thinking about that is like how he started writing about his life from an early age, you know, being very interested in history, being very interested in stories like Barbara was touching on.

Moshe Quinn [00:16:07] He wrote diaries and journals With a certain kind of seriousness, accounting for his life. And he began this really with some serious focus, late teens, early 20s. He was pretty committed to creating journals, accounting for his life and also.

Moshe Quinn [00:16:26] Yeah, I don't know, I think, yeah, just accounting for his life is the way that I think that resonates with me, which is a matter of like him, I think, processing his own meaning or like processing like what is meaningful to him in life and also processing his own identity.

Moshe Quinn [00:16:41] So it's a through line for his whole career. You know, while he's researching and pursuing his career as a historian of Mormonism, he's also kind of like creating his own documents. You know, he's creating his own living documents of his life, maybe even with some sense of himself as a historical figure, someone whose life and inner yearnings, inner struggles is worth looking at.

Moshe Quinn [00:17:05] This version that we have right here is the result of decades really of that project of his, that personal project of his. I myself was not so aware of a highly developed, voluminous, like we have like right now, because all I really had in my own radar at that time was this 40 page thing from the late 80s.

Moshe Quinn [00:17:29] But he did send me a CD ROM in 2010, which I saw. I didn't really know what it was and I was busy and I put it in a drawer and I just never really looked at it. And I don't really recall him asking me. He asked if I had received a thing from him in the mail, but he didn't follow up after I said, oh yeah, I got it and I have and I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. And, and then he never asked me about it again. But he did share it with my older sister Mary and then Lisa, and they looked at it at that time and Mary actually had a few conversations with him about it with some thoughts and whatnot.

Moshe Quinn [00:18:07] But it kind of like, I mean after the 2010, it wasn't like really something that certainly I was aware of myself at all, but even with my sisters, life goes on. And he didn't ask them any questions after like maybe a year or so. And it's sort of just kind of like petered out. And when he passed away and there was like some initial, there were some initial questions about like his memoirs, I myself had no idea what they were really referring to. And those questions didn't go directly to Mary, but I asked her about it and like there was like this thing that she had been aware of, like, yeah, it was going to be on his laptop.

Moshe Quinn [00:18:40] She had the CD ROM somewhere, I'm sure. But this was 11 years later. So she's like, it must be on his laptop. His laptop was, you know, in this condo where he lived by himself in Southern California. And so there was just gonna be a matter of, like, you know, just going through things and having the time to go there. And there were other priorities of ours, you know, immediately after he died. So it was a few months going on, several months before we were able to get the laptop and then Translate these old WordPerfect files that were on his laptop to some legible format where we could actually figure out which files were which.

Moshe Quinn [00:19:15] Like, which files were research files, which files were notes files, and which files actually had to do with his memoirs. And that took some time as well, just to get through the technical process of translating these files in the right way to read. So when we finally were able to get them, we had this question for ourselves, like, well, so what do we do with this? I mean, we know that our father wrote it for a reason.

Moshe Quinn [00:19:35] He didn't write it just for himself. I mean, he was a writer. He was a writer who wanted to communicate stories that really mattered. And so we knew that he wanted this to be read. And it was a matter of time, really, before we had a conversation, a contact with Signature Books to discuss this. And we went to Signature, of course, because there's a long standing connection and relationship between our father and Signature Books. Signature Books, honestly, has been like a household name that I've been very aware of since, well, since early Mormonism, the magic worldview, so since the late 80s.

Moshe Quinn [00:20:09] And, yeah, it just seemed like a logical and a natural fit. And we were excited to see that Signature Books was interested in carrying this manuscript forward into a larger view for the greater public.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:20:24] And I was so excited. I started as director of signature books on March 1, 2022, and the first manuscript to land on my desk was D. Michael Quinn's Memoir. And I said, what? Michael Quinn? He had passed away the year before. But I said, michael Quinn left a memoir. You know, nobody had heard about it in the Mormon history community in general. And so I was so excited, I brought home the hard copy and just couldn't put it down. I was reading at home and at work, and then I did some research into Signatures files, and I found that reviewers. In 1998, when your dad originally submitted the manuscript, the reviewers read it, but it was just more of a skeleton manuscript.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:21:03] And they said, he needs to fill in more thoughts and share more of his feelings and be More vulnerable and kind of open up, and so do that and resubmit it. But then I don't have any records of him ever resubmitting it to Signature Books. So we're thrilled that we did get it when we did, and I'm honored that this was the first manuscript that I started working on in Signature.

Moshe Quinn [00:21:25] And briefly, I want to add to something you were saying earlier, Rebecca, about the voice, and you're just. I'm saying it right now, Barbara. Something for me that feels wonderful and very meaningful is being able to actually get a sense of his voice in ways that I didn't quite have access to, like, knowing him. He was an emotionally reticent father, I would say. He was always very close to us, very present. He's the best listener that I ever had in my life as far as being a supportive, active listener. But what I encounter in his memoir is a quality of candor and a quality of his own voice.

Moshe Quinn [00:22:02] And also, like, some subtle ways which are really interesting, like his sense of humor coming out and the way the irony can play out, the way that he can, like, really succinctly imply something. Imply, like, inner struggle or imply, you know, imply a lot of, like, the underlying emotional content or interpersonal content of a moment or an episode. It's really fascinating to me to see that. Cause it's a facet of. Of his voice and his personality that I didn't have access to because he was a great listener, but he was not necessarily a great divulger in my relationship with him. And so I really deeply value and cherish that vulnerability and that voice as I'm able to see it here.

Quinn's Courtship, Marriage, and Sexuality

John Dehlin [00:22:48] All right, well, what about the book or about what you've learned? Moshe discusses his courtship with Jan and his marrying Jan and to what extent they discussed his sexual orientation before, during their courtship. Anything, any. Anything you have to say about that?

Moshe Quinn [00:23:15] Well, as far as the courtship goes, there was no discussion of his sexuality at that time. I mean, he was in the closet. No one knew. I mean, no one at that time, not even like a close confidant, knew that he was gay. So he met my mother in this context of being completely in the closet. Absolutely. And it wasn't until a few or several years into the marriage that there just came a point where he just realized that it was untenable and unbearable for my mother to continue living in this relationship where she was feeling undesired and unwanted and feeling like she was at fault or she was to blame. And he realized there was just so Much pain and suffering that she was experiencing that he had to come out to her. And that was after their second child was born, as I recall that that happened.

John Dehlin [00:24:10] And

Moshe Quinn [00:24:12] they had two more kids. And then eventually he comes out sort of in stages to various people in his life over time. But, yeah, they met under this condition of complete concealment of that part of his identity.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:24:27] And Jan and Mike, we should point out, they were married in the early 60s when the church was teaching. And there was a belief, a general belief that, oh, homosexuality is just a weakness of the flesh and it's something that can be overcome. You can pray the gay away. And so Mike, I don't think he was, like, trying to hide anything from Jan as much as he just really, really believed that if he married a woman, married Jan in the temple, who he was attracted to, he said, and had children, that this issue would go away, that he would no longer have these feelings of yearnings towards men. So I think he really believed that. And it was only after they become married. And Mike says his yearnings for men only got stronger after he was in a mixed orientation marriage.

Moshe Quinn [00:25:19] I think it's a really great point that you emphasized Barbara about, like, he was attracted to her. I mean, one of the things that he says in the memoir is he'd been dating around that time. He was a student at BYU at the time. He'd been dating women at that time, several, as he puts it, in that recent year or so. And she was the first person that he'd met who was a woman that he actually felt genuinely sexual feelings of attraction for. And he thought that that was obviously a big deal. Like, it was very encouraging and important for him. And it obviously led him forward in a kind of authentic way, a true way for himself.

John Dehlin [00:25:54] I remember very distinctly when I interviewed him the first time, him explaining, though, how problematic his attraction for your mom was, because he said that the more he experienced attraction for a woman, the greater that increased his experience of attraction for men. And so it wasn't like, I don't know if he ever identified as bisexual or just as gay. But what he said is whatever attraction he felt for Jan or a woman would only make it harder for him, not easier for him to be suppressing his own sexual orientation.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:26:30] He said he shared that with you. And what he writes in the memoir is just that his attraction for men after marrying Jan only becomes stronger. And he's dismayed because he thought it would decrease. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:42] So if it's okay, because I want people to buy this amazing book, I'D like to read a little bit, please. So let's. Let's open our books to page 369. The date is 23rd of July, 1978. And the title of this section and this book is just. It's got dates and it's kind of chronological, and it's got really cool sections and entries. And this one's called Painful Cycles in Gay Straight Marriage. And who should be Michael's voice? Should that be Moshe? All right, Moshe.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:27:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:15] Read that first paragraph, which kind of broke my heart. And if it's okay, would you read that? And then I'll just That short paragraph

Moshe Quinn [00:27:24] there on the page.

John Dehlin [00:27:25] Yeah. Not actually read that whole section. Yeah.

Moshe Quinn [00:27:28] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:27:29] Yeah. Please, if you don't mind, if you're comfortable.

Moshe Quinn [00:27:31] Oh, yeah. And I'm comfortable. Yeah. So. 23rd of July, 1978. Painful cycles in Gay Straight Marriage. From my journal, Jan spoke to me of the emptiness she feels with me and the extent of her loneliness for the kind of companionship that I am unable or unwilling to give her. I told her she should not blame herself for the feelings she expressed to me tonight because they were natural and resulted from my own failures.

Mixed-Orientation Marriage and Its Struggles

Moshe Quinn [00:27:59] I brought up the solution of divorce that she has suggested to me seven or eight times in the past, in which I avowed I would not oppose if she brought it up again, even though I dread it as much or more than she does.

Moshe Quinn [00:28:13] I urged it as the only apparent way she will be happy. And I affirmed that I felt she could be happy that way. She wants me to make the final decision. And I said that because the difficulties. And I said that because the difficulties will in large measure be with her than with me, that I could not make that decision for her. I am at the point, however, where I dread anything more than casual conversation, because we seem always to come around directly or indirectly to my failures and the results of my failures. And I have difficulty enduring this constant reminder of my inadequacies and failures with the resultant guilt that oppresses me.

Moshe Quinn [00:28:55] Divorce seems like the ultimate failure of all our dreams. But tonight it seemed like the best and only way for a resolution of our conflicts. Our conversation, like so many before, was expressed in calmness, in anguish, and in quiet tears, and was concluded in the desperate clinging and urgency of lovemaking.

Moshe Quinn [00:29:18] So that's the end quote of the journal entry. And then this is. Without quoting his own journal, this was the cycle of painful discussions we had since 1971. My very detailed journal of 1978-1980 described others, sometimes specifying my Celibate homosexuality as the cause. Suffice it to say that these cycles were repeated during the next seven years of our marriage.

John Dehlin [00:29:45] So like, on the one hand, I'm just like gutted reading this, but then, Moshe, I'm thinking of you and I'm thinking, what's it like for you as one of their children to be reading this? Is there and I don't. And then never. I want you to feel like there's a sense of like, exploitation for getting you to talk about hard stuff. So just only share what you are comfortable sharing and want to share. But I'm curious how it feels for you to the extent that you want to share, reading that about your parents.

Moshe Quinn [00:30:23] Well, there's a lot there, of course, that that comes up. I mean, there's not a big surprise. On the one hand, of course, just because of my lived experience and experiences with them. I mean, really in this moment, like what comes up for me is what I shared a moment ago about feeling gratitude, about having access to his real thoughts, his real feelings.

Moshe Quinn [00:30:57] You know, seeing him as more of a full, complicated human being, which is not the picture available to me, you know, as his son, especially as a boy growing up. But even as an adult, you know, just like so much of one's parents life that you don't have access to. So there is an element of gratitude, like I said, to be able to see him and understand him more fully and more completely. As well as my mother, you know, seeing her and understanding her more fully and completely when I was a boy.

Moshe Quinn [00:31:35] I have a general memory of support and love and care and consideration in our household. A lot of memories along those lines. And then of course, I have memories of strife and arguments and things that were not working out.

Moshe Quinn [00:31:57] So like reading this isn't like triggering. And not that there's any suggestion that it would be for me, but maybe some people might imagine it could be for me, and it's certainly not. So while there are all these layers, like I had mentioned a moment ago, I am feeling, like I said, a lot of gratitude and appreciation for being able to see the bigger picture. Especially with an emotionally reticent father who is not great at divulging and sharing personal things about his life. This feels incredibly valuable to me.

John Dehlin [00:32:33] Barbara or Rebecca, anything about that passage that really sticks out to you? Not to put you on the spot.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:32:41] Sure. Probably we both have thoughts on this.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:32:44] Yeah, I was gonna say that again, since I'm in communication with the readers, people that are reading in the book club and those kinds of passages were just so vulnerable and so overwhelming. We almost felt like we were looking in on something that we shouldn't be looking in on, you know, but yet incredibly moved and touched by everything that he said. That's what I mean. I can't express to everybody just how intimate this book is. It's just incredible. I mean, not everyone knew D. Michael Quinn, certainly not to this level. But you just get such a sense of everything. So, yeah, there's that sense that, should I even be reading this? But I'm so glad that I am and I'm learning so much from it. So that's an amazing gift that your father was able to give to everybody, to readers for this book.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:33:27] So I agree. I think for me, my takeaway after reading through the entire book and just seeing how hopeful Mike was that he could live this, you know, desirable Mormon life of being living as a straight Latter Day Saint man and trying so hard to make that happen.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:33:49] And then seeing these passages that clearly both he and Jan were in so much pain. In spite of their love for their children and love for each other. They were trying so hard to make it work. But ultimately you just see the pain it caused them. And I don't think anyone should ever be encouraged to enter into a marriage like that. And again, there are people I know and love who are either in or have been in mixed orientation marriages. And I love those folks. And I don't want to disparage their marriages in any way, of course, but just reading about how difficult it was, that just shouldn't be. People should be allowed to be who they are and follow their true yearnings and their true identities. Takeaway.

Moshe Quinn [00:34:36] And this passage gets me thinking about when they did get divorced. And my lived experience through that. And there was this.

John Dehlin [00:34:46] What year was that?

Moshe Quinn [00:34:48] Well, 86. 85.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:34:50] 86. 85.

Moshe Quinn [00:34:51] 86. I mean, they separated in 86. I'm sorry, 85. And I think the divorce was finalized in 86. So 85 was like when he moved out of the house. And shortly thereafter, I really had this feeling. And I'm sure there were other complications and layers to it, but I really had this general feeling of a lifting of weight and a clearing of air.

Moshe Quinn [00:35:15] And it seemed, despite all these other complications and life being rich and everything, but it just seemed like in general there was this improvement and a lifting of the weight of stress and anguish. And I was 8 at the time, so a lot of these things, I, you know, I just, I don't. I was not really, really aware of, but, but There was a feeling of this being better and our family situation being better. So, like, as far as this solution of divorce goes, this was in 1978, that that happens. And then seven years later, you know, I'm eight years old, they finally do get divorced. Well, I felt something of the relief of a solution at that time.

John Dehlin [00:35:57] I was just. If I can share, I was just struck by how much he blames himself. He frames it in terms of failure, you know, and he's just beating himself up over Jan's loneliness and his failures. And I'm just thinking, like, he wasn't a failure.

John Dehlin [00:36:16] Like, his context failed him, you know, and it wasn't uniquely Mormon, that context, but I just had the thought, like, it's like the Mormon culture battles that raged between the early 90s and it's been going on forever era in the 70s. But I think, you know, the cultural wars that I've been involved in from, like, let's just say 2005 until present, it's like Michael lived them in his private life in the 70s and 80s as a foreshadowing of the cultural battles that we were all going to experience over the past 15 to 20 years.

John Dehlin [00:37:01] But he was just dealing with it all internally, whether it's same sex, sexuality, LGBTQ suicides, mixed orientation marriages, feminism. Feminism, Historical candor, you know, in the church. Right. Does that resonate with you, Barbara?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:37:18] Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we. I hope it's okay to mention this, but we were just on Latter Gay stories, doing Love Kyle doing an interview there, and Kyle was pointing out how D. Michael Quinn is a pioneer as a queer Mormon. And through this book, younger queer Latter Day Saints or post Mormons can read this and see, oh, I'm not the first to go through this. There are others who have experienced these things and learn of Mike's experience. But, yeah, he was on the forefront of this, and he was suffering in silence early on. Later he comes out in the 90s, and he receives so much acceptance from his friends and loved ones when he does come out to everybody. But, yeah, this was something he silently suffered with starting in the 1950s.

John Dehlin [00:38:03] Yeah. And I just want to emphasize, to limit it to just LGBT stuff would be just a huge disservice. There's a whole history, honesty in the church, feminism, like excommunication, church discipline, like, it's all there.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:38:19] It's all there. It's all there.

John Dehlin [00:38:20] You know what I mean?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:38:21] It's all there.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:38:22] He's a Forrest Gump of Mormonism.

Moshe Quinn [00:38:24] He is.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:38:25] He was there for every step of everything. And I would like to mention just the way the book is laid out. Like John alluded to just sections. You really don't even have to read it in order. You could literally just kind of browse and say, oh my goodness, what about El? Or, you know, so and so. It's really amazing. You can read it all the way through or you can just take these little bite sized pieces of history. He was really there for every pivotal event with his own particular fly on the wall spin on it. And he had access to everyone and everything. So it's just incredible.

John Dehlin [00:38:55] Who's had more access than Michael Quinn that we know of, who wrote stuff, who actually wrote.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:39:01] Wrote it all down? Yeah, I mean, I mean, one of the things that one of the blurbers or reviewers of the book points out, that this book establishes him not only as a great historian in Mormon history, but a central. Actually a figure in Mormon history himself. And I think that's absolutely true.

John Dehlin [00:39:20] For sure. Yeah.

Moshe Quinn [00:39:20] And I appreciate, I mean, I think any memoir does this or any biography, but seeing American history, seeing American cultural history through this lens of this one individual's life and experience experiences, I enjoy that aspect of it as well. Like, you know, touching on these larger moments of American history and culture. And it's. Yeah, it's enriching that way for me.

Quinn's LGBTQ Experience Within Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:39:41] Couple other just moments in the book that tie on the LGBTQ themes that I just want to highlight. One is again, Turn to page 370. We're back in Sunday school. Turn to Seminary 370 30th of July 1978. What is the LDS Church to do? What is the LDS? What is the LDS Church to those who don't fit? And this section floored me and particularly around the, you know, LGBTQ suicide epidemic that we have seen emerging. Let's just read from here. So, Moshe, I don't know if you're comfortable reading that. That blurb.

Moshe Quinn [00:40:22] Yeah, okay. That section, the whole section from my journal. In the priest quorum meeting, the lesson was on the 13th article of faith. I used this as a point of departure for discussing the role of the church and of what it means to be a Latter Day Saint who often does not have all the perfect virtues listed in the article of faith 13.

Moshe Quinn [00:40:45] I reminded them of the old story about the argument for whether to buy a new ambulance to or build a better fence because of the people falling over the cliff. I asked the teenage priests what they thought was a good representation of the church in this story. Predictably, most of them, led by Abin Gwynne said that the church was both a fence and an ambulance. But I was caught off guard when someone said that the church was also the cliff. I spent a few minutes discussing this point in reference to members of the church, sometimes feeling that the church brings them burdens and trials of action and conscience that are hard to bear.

Moshe Quinn [00:41:24] Bishop Horn commented that the bishop of the singles ward in our stake had told him that for the past several years, until this last Christmas season, there had been an average of five suicides in the singles ward each year in December. I didn't challenge him, but I wondered if he meant. But I wondered if he meant or the other bishop meant five attempted suicides. And because five successful suicides a year or month in one congregation would be an enormous rate.

John Dehlin [00:41:55] And the reason why this gutted me is because I remember when I started studying the LGBTQ Mormon experience. As early as 2005, I would notice the obituaries in the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune. It was like almost every month, there was, like, some kid who loved choir theater, went on a mission, and then all of a sudden, he died young and they didn't and explain why. And that's when I started deciding I wanted to study the LGBTQ experience. And that's when I learned about the high rates of LGBTQ suicide. This seems like a foreshadowing or a. I don't know, prophecy or whatever of that. Barbara, did. Did that strike you at all? Did that come to your mind when you edited this?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:42:33] Well, on that passage itself, it seems like he's just talking about young people in general. So I don't. But maybe they were all, you know, perhaps queer Mormons, but. But, yeah, that passage struck me as well. The cliff that the church can sometimes be a cliff that people fall off. You know, that's the thing that can actually hurt people. And again, we know that it can hurt people in the LGBTQ community, people of color, you know, racism that can exist.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:43:00] So, yeah, what I hope from this book, and I think what Mike hoped in writing, is that it leads to change, and it links to people reading his story and understanding people who are different from ourselves and coming to feel love and compassion for them. Last night, we were at a book signing at Benchmark Books, and I asked folks who knew Mike if they wanted to stand up and share an experience. And one of the most profound moments for me was when Sandra Tanner stood up.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:43:31] And Sandra Tanner and Mike Gerald and Sanders Tanner and Mike Quinn were like this in life. They were. I don't know if better enemies is too strong of a word. But they did not like each other at all. And Sandra Tanner stood up, and she said, I've been reading this book, and I've been gaining an appreciation for Mike Quinn. And she goes, I'm starting to like him.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:43:55] And she says, I'm realizing I have so much in common with him that I did not know growing up in la and his thoughts on the Vietnam War were the same as Gerald. And my thoughts. And she said, this book, by reading his story, I have gained an appreciation for Mike Quinn, who before, she did not like in life, understandably.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:44:13] So, again, I think through hearing each other's stories, Mormon stories, we gain an appreciation for and compassion for people who are different from ourselves.

Moshe Quinn [00:44:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:23] I'll just say I reached out to Sandra and said, you need to buy this book, and I like to have you on Mormon stories to talk about it, because I read some. The stuff involving Gerald in it.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:44:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:33] So we're gonna.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:44:33] We did an episode on that.

John Dehlin [00:44:35] Yeah. Oh, yeah. So we are gonna have Sandra back to talk about her reactions to this book.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:44:40] Oh, wonderful.

John Dehlin [00:44:40] Barbara, of course, you're welcome to join us.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:44:42] Would love to.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:44:42] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:44:43] Yeah. But I'm excited for that. Okay, one more quick thing. Just on this LGBTQ theme, turn in your pages to page 378. Moshe will be the very last paragraph on 378, and then just the first remaining sentence on 379. So a little background. Do you want to give the background of why D. Michael Quinn was in the home of church president Spencer W. Kimball and what he was doing there?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:45:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:11] I mean, this just shows how unbelievable. This is unbelievable.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:45:15] It shows how incredibly well connected he was with top church leaders, even Spencer W. Kimball. And I can't remember, is he the president of the church when 78, or is he an apostle?

John Dehlin [00:45:27] Yeah. Okay.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:45:27] So he's the president of the church. And Mike Quinn says, hey, I'd love to access your personal journals. He finds out that President Kimball had kept a journal his whole life. And President Kimmel says, well, sure, you know, and he says, well, I've got all my journals at my house. Why don't you come up to my house?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:45:44] So he goes up and back then, of course, you didn't have laptops. You just brought your typewriter with you. And he's just looking at President Kimball's journals and then typing them into his, using his typewriter. Camilla comes in, says, hey, boys, I've got some fried chicken in the kitchen. He goes in, has fried chicken with Spencer and Camilla at their kitchen table. And then, and then he comes back another time and Spencer Kimball set up a card table next to his desk in his office and Mike is sitting there working next to him. And President Kimball walks over and says, well, what are you doing?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:46:16] And Mike just kind of tells him he's. Mike's a little bit surprised too. He's like, wow, he's giving me just incredible access, incredibly open about sharing his journals with me. So that's, that's the kind of, in. What's the right word? Just the connections he has with very top insiders in the church. And he develops this, this friendship with Spencer Kimball not only through that, but he also gets a blessing from President Kimball at one point.

John Dehlin [00:46:40] Yeah, no, yeah, he talked about that in my interview with him. Where's. Where he's blessed to become an apostle? Right.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:46:46] Well, it's interesting because when you read the memoir, it doesn't quite come out like that.

John Dehlin [00:46:52] That's kind of what I remember him saying in my interview with you.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:46:55] Yeah, he. Well, yes, exactly. He would often say that he had been blessed to become an apostle. So I always thought that, you know, I heard him say that story too. When you read in the memoir. And again, this is my interpretation of it. It sounds like he says he's carrying this burden. In fact, this is one of the reasons he stays in a mixed orientation marriage and he's staying trying to be straight because he believes his grandmother has been telling him since he was 9 years old that someday you're going to become an apostle. So Mike Quinn was that kid in sacrament meeting who get up every fast and testimony meeting and give his testimony.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:47:30] So people started telling him from time he was 9, you're going to be an apostle someday. So he has this belief he's going to become an apostle someday. He goes and he sees President Kimball and he says, I think I'm supposed to become an apostle someday. I think the Lord has been telling me that. And Spencer Kimball says, okay, well, you know, don't aspire to any callings, but just keep serving in every calling that you have. And if in fact what that feeling you got was coming from God, then, then that will be fulfilled.

John Dehlin [00:47:57] Yeah, yeah. But, yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:48:01] So what's, what also comes out in this memoir though too is like every single mission companion he has and almost every friend he has also said, I, I've been told through the spirit or through my patriarchal blessing that I'm going to become an apostle someday. So it seems like that was a thing for Young men at the time. Young woman.

John Dehlin [00:48:18] Yeah, probably was. All right, so. So that's the context. And, and I was going to say, Rebecca, can you imagine like Russell and Nelson or don't. Inviting like, come on over.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:48:29] I don't think we have that access today.

John Dehlin [00:48:32] Inviting, like, I don't know, who's the church historian inviting like, Ben park to like, transcribe his diary. Like, I remember Ted Lyon coming on Mormon stories and saying that the church changed its policy where it now forbids apostles from keeping journals, let alone letting historians transcribe their journals. So this is just mind blowing.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:48:55] Yeah, it is.

John Dehlin [00:48:56] Okay, so anyway, back to the story. So Kimball is eating fried chicken, transcribing Spencer, Debbie, Kibble, the Prophet's journal, and Moshe, will you read that little blurb that kind of blew this blue? This was probably maybe the most mind blowing part of the whole book for me. But, you know, anyway, President Kimball got

Moshe Quinn [00:49:17] up from his desk to walk with me to the door of the office. And I thanked him also for allowing me to express to him my feelings about my own background as he spoke of his efforts for the Indians. At this point, he clenched.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:49:29] He cl.

Moshe Quinn [00:49:30] He clutched me in his left arm while he held my hand in his right hand. And he said, it makes me love you all the more to know that you are Mexican. And then he snuggled his cheek up to mine. I left his office feeling joy in the spirit of the Lord.

John Dehlin [00:49:49] Now, I'm going to acknowledge that people could read this in lots of different ways. And I'm not trying to in any way inject scandal into this when there may not be any. There is this trope of, like, the most vociferous religious leaders who are sort of anti LGBT are often found to have those proclivities themselves. And it's a well known rumor. It's a prevalent rumor for decades at some point, speculatory rumor that maybe Packer or maybe Kimball experienced same sex attraction. And that might be why they were some of the church's foremost outspoken leaders against homosexuality. This passage, both the. Both the comment, it makes me love you all the more to know that you are Mexican. Along with that, that description of snuggling his cheek, it did make me think about that. But I'm not trying to invent or inj.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:50:52] Well, in that same passage, he says that Spencer Kimball looks at him and says, you are a fine looking man. Really a fine looking man. And I had never heard these rumors that you just brought up, ever. But when I read that, I was like, huh, that's interesting. And then there's a later passage in the book, too, where Spencer Kimball shows him a lot of affection, so that it could be inter. Mike interprets it. He says it's like the love of a father, and he loved having that kind of an affection from an elderly man, from an older man. But it could be interpreted other ways as well. I think that's a very interesting passage when it's the last time he sees Spencer Kimball before he passes away.

John Dehlin [00:51:36] Any other. Any other thoughts about that? Silly.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:51:41] I think the other passage that Barb is referring to. I thought I had it marked. I was trying to find the section. It's called the Prophet's, and I think that definitely.

John Dehlin [00:51:47] Do you want to read it?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:51:48] I'm trying to find it. I'm looking in the index. I thought I had it marked, but I don't think I do. So I don't want to take the time. Unless it's under kiss.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:51:56] While you're looking for that, I could comment on why he said, I love you all the more because you are a Mexican. So Spencer Kimball was born and raised in Arizona, and he did have a special affinity towards Native Americans and Mexicans, whom he believed, the church believed were all Lamanites. And so it was Spencer Kimball who promoted the Lamanite generation. And he actually called Mike at one point in the memoir. He calls him his. His little Lamanite, I think, anyway. So that's kind of where that statement is coming from, I believe. Just knowing he's a Lamanite, so.

John Dehlin [00:52:36] And, you know, the way people spoke 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago is different than the way.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:52:42] Yeah, this was in the 40 years ago. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:45] Yeah. So we have to not engage in. What's it called? Presentism. Is that right?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:52:50] It's called presentism.

John Dehlin [00:52:51] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:52:52] You're a good historian, John.

John Dehlin [00:52:53] I don't know. I try. Moshe, did you have anything you wanted to add there? I don't mean to put you on the spot. Okay.

Moshe Quinn [00:53:03] No, but I mean, it does remind me of some. I mean, I guess I do. I said no, but I do a little bit. There are some passages here and I can't find them myself right now, but there definitely are some moments when he does observe and he observes moments of affection, physical affection between men. I agree with Barbara. In many of these contexts, it doesn't seem to suggest sexual attraction or romantic feeling. It's an expression of affection between men. But it caught our father's attention, my father's attention, for understandable reasons. But it did seem like in many of These contexts, he did appreciate something of a chaste quality to that sense of bonding and connecting with men or people of the same sex that really was not sexual or romantic, especially because

Barbara Jones Brown [00:53:58] he didn't have that kind of relationship

Moshe Quinn [00:53:59] with his father, which is. I'm going to touch on the church

Barbara Jones Brown [00:54:01] leaders became father figures.

Moshe Quinn [00:54:02] Exactly. And so there is this element of a father son connection relationship that was absent from his life that I think is part of that picture. And it reminds me of, like, when I was a kid and it mentioned snuggling of the cheek between Kimball and himself. And this is a thing that happens very commonly between fathers and children, perhaps. But there was this thing that he would often do when he was putting me to bed. I'm six or seven years old. And. And he had his five o' clock shadow on his cheek, and he would sort of just rub his cheek against my face, and I'd be all squirming and freaking out, but also kind of like laughing and delighting because it was sort of like a little game.

Moshe Quinn [00:54:39] And it was an aspect of connection and bonding and a show of affection. And he would kiss me on the cheek, and he would also kiss me on the lips sometimes, which I always felt. Not always, but it could feel like, oh, well, that's an extreme form of showing of an affection because he didn't always do it, but he did do it sometimes. And he does mention some moments, like right here, where he would observe somebody else kissing their son on the lips or he'd hear somebody talking about how they would kiss their children on the lips and how he felt as a young man.

Moshe Quinn [00:55:13] That. That was just a really lovely and powerful demonstration of love from a parent to a child. And I experienced that myself as something that he valued and would express to me when I was of boy, I

John Dehlin [00:55:27] kissed my dad on the lips growing up. Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:55:31] My. I. I wonder if it's a generational thing, because my grandma used to kiss. Kiss all of us on the lips. And like, my cousins and I be like, oh, grandma kissed us on the lips.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:55:40] Seems.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:55:40] But it seems like that was just more common.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:55:42] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:55:43] In earlier generations.

Moshe Quinn [00:55:45] But.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:55:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:55:46] Well, going back to Sandra, I mean, the. The part that I jumped to immediately when I got the book, you know. Previously on Mormon Stories, we covered the Gerald and Sandra Tanner biography that was written. Right.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:56:01] Lighthouse, I think.

John Dehlin [00:56:02] Was that your first appearance, Barbara, on Mormon Stories? Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:56:05] Yeah. We talked about Lighthouse, the biography of Gerald and Sandra Tanner.

John Dehlin [00:56:08] Yeah. Written by.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:56:09] Written by Ron Huggins. Published by Signature Books.

John Dehlin [00:56:12] Yeah. Get it. That's A good one.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:56:15] Won the Mormon History Association's best biography award.

John Dehlin [00:56:18] Yeah, absolutely. And we talked about the Dr. Clandestine affair. Yes. I don't want to rehash all that, but I do want to give a little bit of context or review, at least at a high level of that, because this sheds more light on that whole deal.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:56:36] Yes, it does.

John Dehlin [00:56:37] And I think it's kind of really interesting. So, Barbara, do you want to kind of maybe give a little bit of an overview or retelling of that context?

Quinn, the Tanners, and Mormon Historical Transparency

Barbara Jones Brown [00:56:46] Sure, yeah. So Gerald and Sandra Tanner were ex Mormons at the time. They were evangelical Christians, and they started what was called the Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake City. And their. Their mission was to share Mormon history, quotations from throughout Mormon history with Latter Day Saints and. And lead Latter Day Saints out of their faith to lead Mormonism. And so they published a book titled Mormonism Shadow or Reality? And this was in the 1970s.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:57:16] And so Mike Quinn at the time was working under Leonard Arrington in the church history department. And the church history department was getting all these letters from state presidents from throughout the United States saying, how do we respond to this, the Tanner's book? And so Leonard says, well, Mike, why don't you try writing something up, you know, addressing all of these questions that are brought. So Mike does so, and he writes a long kind of treatise, and he brings it to church leaders of the Church history department, and they look it over and they're like, oh, we don't. I don't know that we want to publish this because it kind of brings up more questions than it answers.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:57:54] And so Leonard tells Mike, sorry, we're not going to publish this work you've been working on for a while. And Mike is so proud of this work. So what he decides to do is to publish it anyway, anonymously, and to leave these pamphlets in a locker in Salt Lake City and leave a key. And he sends it to Sam Weller's bookstore, and they go in and start selling these pamphlets. And so the Tanners get word that somebody's written this anonymous response to their pamphlet.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:58:22] And very quickly Gerald Tanner figures out that it's D. Michael Quinn that's done it. And the way he figures that out is because Mike Quinn uses the Latin phrase post hoc Dr. Ergo prostoc.

John Dehlin [00:58:36] Yes.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:58:37] Yeah. Anyway, some Latin phrase. And then Gerald's like, that's an unusual turn of phrase that very few people would use. So then he starts reading various church historians works. He comes across d. Michael Quinn's PhD dissertation. And he uses that phrase several times there. And so he's like, aha, it's D. Michael Quinn. So that's the beginning of conflict between the two. Because at first Mike denies it, he lies about it, and then he just says, well, I will neither confirm nor deny that it was me. But it's. Anyways, it's a fascinating story, but that's what led to this conflict between the Tanners and Mike Quinn. And again, Sandra Sedless. And I never got to meet him, but by reading his book, I'm starting to actually like him and understand more where he was coming from.

John Dehlin [00:59:21] Yeah. And we mentioned this in the previous interview, that he ends up funding this project himself. Costs him thousands of dollars to create these pamphlets. I think he didn't go on a vacation with your mom because he used that, that money to fund the pamphlet instead of going on vacation with Jan.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:59:41] Yeah, they had a trip to Asia planned or something like that. And he has these NEH funds, National Endowment for the Humanities leftover. And instead of using it to take your mom on this trip to Asia, he uses it to print all these pamphlets.

John Dehlin [00:59:52] Yeah. And on page 354, second paragraph, it says, I was thrilled that my budget of about $1200 resulted in 2000 nice looking booklets of 63 pages each. And then I paid about $100 for stamps and mailed 350 copies by third class delivery to every LDS Institute admission home in the United States, in Canada, plus to the presiding officers and stakes and wards in the west and the various Mormon historians. I'm trying to think about like somebody, some well intentioned apologist emailing their version of like the CES letter to like every CES building and all the mission presidents. Like I don't know that that could cause trouble. And it certainly does.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:00:44] Yes, it does.

John Dehlin [01:00:45] So. So part of what I thought was worth looking at. So let's jump to turn to page 356. December 27, 1977. Immunizing. I loved it. He used to the term immunizing.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:01:00] Yeah, yeah, he was ahead of his time.

John Dehlin [01:01:05] As if truth is a virus.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:01:06] Right.

John Dehlin [01:01:06] And he's got enough. Let's. Let's read a little bit from that. Moshe, do you mind?

Moshe Quinn [01:01:12] No, I don't mind. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:01:13] Yeah.

Moshe Quinn [01:01:14] That section, the whole. Okay. From my journal about the history division's Christmas party at the Arringtons. We got on the subject of telling the truth of our history and why. Sorry. And why the authorities resist it. I was doing most of the talking at this point and said that men like Boyd Packer dislike our approach because they feel we will only cause people to ask more questions and they are afraid of the Saints asking questions. They feel they are protecting the Saints, whereas we feel they are making them vulnerable to attacks by people like the Tanners or by deceptive schismatics. I said they could not seem to understand that we were trying to expose the average Saints to the broad perspectives of truth and history in order to protect them from being overwhelmed by a barrage of truth or half truth truth of our history by the polemicist.

Moshe Quinn [01:02:09] Up to this point, Leonard had been generally quiet, but he interjected at this point that we were seeking to immunize the Saints by presenting the broad perspective of our history. That was a tremendous idea that I have often described without realizing it end quote to his journal. And then just one last sentence in this memoir. I would use the analogy in my talk to BYU students and faculty less than four years later.

John Dehlin [01:02:34] Okay, so there's a couple things that is interesting about that to me, obviously. One is that I was struck by whether it's the B.H. roberts secret Mormon meetings of 1922 or the release of no Man Knows my history in 46 or whatever, there were moments in time where the brethren knew.

John Dehlin [01:02:55] Because I always get this question, do the top church leaders know about the problems with the church or are they ignorant? You know, and there are these moments in time where you just kind of know they knew. And to me this is and of course Adventures of a Church Historian with Leonard Arrington makes that very clear. So this isn't the first book to do that, but this is a really blatant example of an insider making it really clear that not only does everybody know there's do the top church Mormon church leaders know there's significant historical problems, but at least some of them are intentionally trying to keep this information from the members.

John Dehlin [01:03:35] To me, that's significant. And that they were banting around this idea of immunization as early as the mid-70s. Anyone have a comment or thought about that before I then talk about the next point?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:03:46] Yeah, so as a historian myself, I was just kind of amazed at how ahead of his time he was. This is before the Internet. This is the 1970s. And in fact there's a quote somewhere. I put it in the publisher's introduction, I believe. But somewhere in the memoir he's talking to somebody and it's in 1974 and his friend says how long do you think it'll take before the church will be willing to talk about post manifesto polygamy and the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Joseph Smith's polygamy, whatever, you know, these challenging topics. And Mike says, I think this will be completed, it'll be finished in 50 years.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:04:29] Guess what? 50 years later is 20, 24. So he was almost prophetic. I mean the fact that then his memoir would come out right now, 50 years later is something. But yeah, he was ahead of his time and he was right. People should know about all this and you shouldn't hide it. And you can't hide it. It's out there.

Moshe Quinn [01:04:49] You know, is that completed or how much further does the church have to go?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:04:53] I think there's still.

John Dehlin [01:04:54] Yeah, exactly.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:04:59] I think what he says.

John Dehlin [01:05:00] I think the quote is so diplomatic.

Moshe Quinn [01:05:03] I want to ask Amy, what do you think?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:05:05] Yeah, no, there's still more to do. There's still more to do. I think what Mike is saying is like they'll be talking about it, it'll be out there. I mean, I think that the Gospel topics essays being on the church's website is part of the fulfillment of that. I think, you know, as you mentioned, John, I've written a book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre that's part of the fulfillment of what Mike was saying in 1974 that this would happen. And I hope that this memoir continues to bring more to light. And Moshe and I have been talking about the project that Mike Quinn never finished his magnum opus about post manifesto polygamy. But Moshe has found what he did complete and we're going to be working together to publish that. So that's coming.

Moshe Quinn [01:05:58] It's coming. So but one thing I just want to share, to reflect back to what you were saying about like what you were saying 50 years ago. I mean, I think 74 to me this is an interesting and telling example of his like his optimism and faith in the institution and faith in the leadership and faith in human nature in a sense. Like he really believed that there would be the shining of the light and that people would see the need for it, the leadership would see the need for it and appreciate the need for it and come around. So it's his not just faith in his humanity, but faith in the church itself and faith in the leadership of the church itself.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:06:39] I thought of that Moshe, when watching the Mormon stories in Hebrew interview you just did about gay Latter Day Saints, gay married Latter Day Saints who were participating in their wards and taking the sacraments, serving in callings. And I was thinking about Mike and I think he'd be so pleased to see that change happening. Yeah, I think he believed it would happen.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:07:03] Someday.

Moshe Quinn [01:07:05] I think so, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:11] Beautiful. Okay, so as we just leave an entire section on page 356 about the importance of truth and honesty and candor, then we have Gerald Tanner finding out that Michael Quinn. Well, suspecting that Michael Quinn was the author of Dr. Clandestine. And there's a recounting of Gerald Tanner calling D. Michael Quinn to find out if he was the author. And I thought this was just stunning to be the exact next section after he's talking about honesty in church history. Right?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:07:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:47] Moshe, do you mind reading at least the first couple paragraphs from that section? This is December 30, 1977, entitled Gerald Tanner Reacts. All right.

Moshe Quinn [01:07:57] Yeah. And feel free to just tell me when to stop.

John Dehlin [01:07:59] Okay. Do three. Do three per unaware. Five. Sorry, Five. Yeah.

Moshe Quinn [01:08:04] Okay, I'll count as I go. Unaware that Reid Durham was collaborating with the Tanners, I was mentally unprepared for the phone call I received this evening from my journal, in parts. Quote, after I got home, the phone rang and a high pitched man's voice asked, are you the author of Gerald and Sandra Tanner's Distorted View of Mormonism? A response to Mormonism, Shadow or Reality?

Moshe Quinn [01:08:26] He said, my information is that in a meeting in the LDS Historical Department, Leonard Arrington asked you to write such a document. I replied that I had no knowledge of such a meeting or conversation. Finally, I asked who it was I was talking to, and he said, as I had suspicioned that he was Gerald Tanner, he may have asked me a few more times if I had written the pamphlet, which I flatly denied before our phone conversation ended.

Moshe Quinn [01:08:55] If asked again about this moment, I think I will adopt the policy of not assisting in identifying the author by the process of elimination that will be possible. As Tanner and his friends asked various historians if they did or did not write the pamphlet.

Moshe Quinn [01:09:10] The last approach is what I should have said at the beginning of our phone call. However, caught completely off guard, I lied repeatedly and reluctantly to Gerald Tanner.

John Dehlin [01:09:21] Yeah. Like on the one hand, he's saying the church needs to be more honest. On the other hand, he's literally lying. I mean, I don't mean there's no judgment here. Right. But it's interesting, right?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:09:32] It's really interesting. I think it's also interesting that he's vulnerable enough to share this with the world. Like, he admits that he lied.

Moshe Quinn [01:09:43] Yeah, well, yeah. And he. And he says very explicitly, like, writing his own life, he feels like it's only appropriate to write of his own life in the way that he's been writing about church history. His entire career. And it only seems consistent and it only seems the right thing to do. So that kind of candor was an explicit part of his values and the mission that was driving him and guiding him through this project. Warts and all, as he would say.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:10:09] Warts and all.

John Dehlin [01:10:10] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, the stunningness for me isn't ended. Let's turn to page 358. Rebecca, will you read those last two paragraphs? Just because I want to make sure and get you in here.

Conflict Over Church History and Institutional Pressure

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:10:22] Sure, I can do that. My worst fears about publishing the response anonymously.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:10:28] Let's see.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:10:29] Were fulfilled and surpassed. Bombarded with inquiries by friends, foes, colleagues, students, reporters and strangers, I made the judicious reply that I wouldn't confirm or deny authorship because to do so would limit the range of guesses about. About an author who obviously wanted to remain anonymous among the limited number of LDS historians. I was privately embarrassed by my initial denial on the phone to Gerald Tanner, but was appalled that Leonard.

John Dehlin [01:11:02] This is Leonard Arrington.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:11:03] Leonard Arrington found himself in the position of making repeated denials that he had any knowledge of the booklet's origin. As advocates of the new Mormon history, we were caught in tangled webs of our best intentions of faith. I felt embarrassed empathy for the LDS headquarters and its generations of compromising defenders. In his plain account of Christian perfection, Methodist founder John Wesley had described such compromise as the lie for the Lord. And I was going to say that,

John Dehlin [01:11:36] yes, his life for God.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:11:37] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:11:38] But we know it is.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:11:38] Oh, did I say Lord? That's hilarious. That must be kind of a. Yeah, I was. I was thinking that. That I feel like in his lie he was protecting the church. I think because it has to be anonymous, you don't want anyone to know that perhaps the church had orchestrated this. Maybe so. Maybe that was his mindset.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:11:55] Yeah, he was protecting himself. And he's also protecting his mentor, Leonard. Because the church leaders that G. Homer Durham, who was over the church history department, said, no, don't publish this. But then Leonard and Mike decide, okay, I'm going to publish it anyway, just anonymously. So, yeah, not a good decision.

John Dehlin [01:12:16] Yeah. So like, Leonard Arrington was lying to this idea of everybody lying again. We talked about all the different ways Quinn's 1970s and 80s life mirrored what we would all experience 40, 50 years later. Apologetics. Add Mormon apologetics to that. Right. Because there's always a modern frustration about how honest, whether it's Mormon apologists and. Or the Gospel topics essays themselves. How honest versus dishonest they are. And of course, this idea of dishonesty is a human thing, but it goes back to the early foundings of Mormonism, too. We do have a history, as humans of deception in our history. Barbara, what do you think?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:12:59] Well, in that episode, I was. And I hope you'll have this in the show notes so people could watch the episode in which it was myself.

John Dehlin [01:13:05] Julia's taking notes.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:13:07] Okay. So it was myself representing this because I was editing this at the time. And then Sandra Tanner and her biographer Ron Huggins, and then Gary Bergera reading from Leonard Arrington's diaries. And it was called Dr. Clandestine, I think, anyways. But I said in that episode that I called Mike an apologetic critic. He was not afraid to be, you know, very forthcoming and critical of church history. But yet at the same time, he was also an apologist because he was always defending the church. So I thought that was a really interesting combination that he had. So super critical about, you know, various things in the church, but yet, till the end of his life, always believing in Joseph Smith's divine mission, Joseph Smith's truth claims.

Moshe Quinn [01:13:55] Yeah. And that was something that. I mean, I'm not. I haven't said this quite yet, but to be clear, I'm not, like, in the church at all. I'm not sure if I said it this. I said that so often lately, but I'm not sure if I said that yet here this afternoon. And so I don't have a lot of knowledge, background knowledge of a lot of these details and nuances. But to your point, that has always, like, struck me as being part of what has seemed to me kind of tragic and hard on an emotional level about his situation where he.

Moshe Quinn [01:14:24] He wrote what he wrote in deep faith and service to the church that he loved, and he was kicked out of it for it. But also, he wasn't like a bomb throw in the sense of he's not trying to tear the church down. If that was his mission, then he would have found a lot of other friends and support. And there's maybe something about his position that was not entirely singular but somewhat unique and even more of a minority position of being willing to write things and engage with questions that the church doesn't want you to do, and therefore you are attacked for it by the church.

Moshe Quinn [01:15:04] But neither are you, like, making friends, you know, being, like, an outright antagonist. No. So he's serving the church, but then suffering for it. And very alone.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:15:14] I was gonna say

Moshe Quinn [01:15:16] it has always struck me as, like, being a very uniquely alone position to be in we

Barbara Jones Brown [01:15:22] talked last night about one of his dear friends, Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was who was excommunicated. She was one of the September six, along with Mike. And Lavina said she was doing the same thing for the same reason. She was pointing out instances of abuse by ecclesiastical leaders and as a fully devoted, faithful Mormon. And the reason why she was doing it is she was trying to make the church better. And I think Mike was the same way, but he was just talking about history and with the hope of making things better. And of course, they came into the cross hairs of church leaders and were excommunicated for it. But ultimately they were just trying to make the church better. And they were believers, both of them, until the end of their lives.

John Dehlin [01:16:02] And I want to return to that today before we end, because that's mind blowing to me and it always was in my first interview and my second interview how he retained a literal belief, including in literal gold plates, as Richard Bushman does to this day. But I do want to close out just and Barbara, I want to seek your understanding on this point. So Turning to page 361, there's this part where he writes, I had been working on the McKay diaries. This is David O. McKay for only an hour or two when one of the secretaries came to my work area and told me that Brother Durham, Homer Durham, G.

John Dehlin [01:16:40] Home G. Homer Durham wanted to see me in his office right away. At one point point he referred to historians. This is G. Homer Durham. At one point he referred to historians who insisted on trying to discover whether leading persons used three or four pieces of toilet paper to cleanse themselves after a bowel movement. This was a crude version of Apostle Boyd K. Packer's views. Did you have a thought about Homer Durham's characterization of Boyd K. Packer's view of historians? Or maybe that wasn't a surprise.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:17:15] BARBARA yeah, so I think it just shows that church leaders at the time felt like, look, we don't need to go into, you know, every nook and cranny, pardon the pun,

Moshe Quinn [01:17:27] every crack you

Barbara Jones Brown [01:17:28] didn't say about church history. You know, just focus on the basics, focus on the faith promoting, focus on the glorious, wonderful aspects of our church history. We don't need to delve into the nitty gritty of oh, okay, actually there was post manifesto polygamy, for example, or, you know, it was just felt like they were going into these these new historians of the new Mormon history, PhD historians and so forth were going places that church leaders didn't want them to go.

John Dehlin [01:17:59] Yeah. So yeah. And to that point, like at the. As this continues, February 17, 1978, and

Moshe Quinn [01:18:08] this is before

John Dehlin [01:18:11] the priesthood revelation. This is the same year as black Mormons received the possibility of the priesthood and temple blessings. He writes, this is confrontation. The clenched fist salute. G. Homer Durham launched into a tirade about the anonymous response response to the Tanner. So G. Homer Durham's mad about the

Barbara Jones Brown [01:18:36] Tanner because he said, don't publish this. And all of a sudden somebody's published it.

John Dehlin [01:18:40] And clearly he's not just mad himself. He's probably worried about what people above him are concerned about or have said. And then he writes, he said he was very upset by its public availability because he had specifically instructed Leonard Arrington not to publish it. And then he goes on, he's trying, you know, Durham tries to find out who wrote it. What does he tell Durham?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:19:02] Well, Durham pulls Quinn into his office and says, tell me you know. And Quinn says, I will neither confirm nor deny. And Durham says, as your priesthood leader, I am telling you, you have to tell me, you know, who wrote this. And Quinn still says, I will neither confirm nor deny.

John Dehlin [01:19:19] You got to respect his, his persistence. But the very next passage is March 7, 1978, official church historian no more. And it's where Quinn finds out that Leonard Arrington is no longer the official church historian. And you know, he writes, moshe, would you mind reading, starting from the. Go ahead and just read that section if you don't mind, on 362.

Moshe Quinn [01:19:49] So from my journal, quote, I told Leonard that I had been informed that after six years of being officially sustained in general conferences by appointment of the First Presidency as church historian, that he was no longer in that position.

Moshe Quinn [01:20:04] Leonard's response was so typical of him that I could have cried. Yes, he said, and now I am finally relieved of having a title that implied that I. That I had the responsibility of giving the official view of LDS history. Now we can go on with our work without that burden.

Moshe Quinn [01:20:22] The timing of my mentor's humiliating demotion was too close to my confrontation with G. Homer Durham to be mere coincidence. He clearly blamed the anonymous pamphlet's publication on Leonard, whom this general authority undoubtedly charged with rank insubordination. In Durham's subsequent meetings with Apostle Packer and with the First Presidency, Leonard's comments to me the previous October showed that he was already in serious conflict. And with this lower ranking general authority before its publication, my pamphlet was the last straw in Durham's back breaking relationship with Leonard. What a sad outcome of my faith promoting intentions.

John Dehlin [01:21:04] Barbara, your reactions to that?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:21:05] Yeah, So I read this and I, you know, I knew about how Leonard Arrington was demoted, if you will, and then eventually his department is sent down to BYU by church leaders because they feel like these. These professional historians, this new Mormon history, we don't like this.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:21:23] They kind of wanted to create some distance. And then they refused to publish some of the books that this department was working on publishing. Incidentally, that's why Signature Books was started in 1981. The founder and owner, George Smith, said there needs to be a press that will publish these books that the. These folks were working on. So that's why Signature Books exist today.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:21:44] Anyways, so I was like, wow, was it because. Was this pamphlet truly the last straw? So then I went to Leonard Arrington's diaries and read there. Leonard doesn't mention it as being something that leads to it. There's undoubtedly. He talks a lot about this conflict between himself and G. Homer Durham. He doesn't specifically say that this pamphlet is the reason. He does talk about the pamphlet earlier and Gerald Tanner calling him and how awkward that was for him to have to lie about it. Choose to lie about it. But anyway, so that was Quinn's belief. But it is true that shortly after this happened, this demotion takes place.

John Dehlin [01:22:26] And, you know, I had read Adventures of a Church Historian and I was sad about Arrington's demotion. And then like more than a decade later, I learned about the, you know, Dr. Clandestine pamphlet. I did not, for some reason put that together until this book.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:22:42] That it's happening the same time.

John Dehlin [01:22:44] Well, that according to D. Michael Quinn, the pamphlet was the last straw in Leonard Arrington's administration. Has that been generally well known, or is this book. No, I didn't kind of break.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:22:54] No, I had never heard it. So when I read it, I was like, wow, I didn't know that. So that was Quinn's perception. But again, Arrington's perception. He says it's a lot of other things, but I'm sure. I'm sure that played into it. I'm sure it was part of it.

John Dehlin [01:23:08] Wow. Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:23:11] Well, okay, we gotta get some feminism in here and some women's stuff, if that's okay. So let's go to page 376. Barbara, I'm gonna have you read.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:20] I don't have a book.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:23:21] I'll hand you.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:23] I'm happy to read.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:23:24] There you go.

John Dehlin [01:23:25] So, Barbara, will you read starting with the first presidency's opposition page?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:30] What?

John Dehlin [01:23:31] 376.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:34] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:23:35] And this is just him. You know, the Equal Rights Amendment was Something that, you know, was attempted to be passed in the mid to late 70s.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:43] The era.

Moshe Quinn [01:23:43] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:44] This was gut wrenching too.

John Dehlin [01:23:45] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:45] What? Starting with what?

John Dehlin [01:23:47] The First Presidency's opposition. First paragraph.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:23:50] The First Presidency's opposition seemed misogynistically patriarchal. It was. It also openly used homophobic arguments against the era. And that is absolutely true.

John Dehlin [01:24:02] Like to see him pulling out the words misogynist and homophobic in the 70s, that's kind of forward thinking.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:24:10] Yeah, he was very forward thinking. Absolutely. Very bold. Furthermore, investigative journalists were uncovering a widespread, if not universal pattern of deceit and concealment involving the LDS Church's role in. In promoting and financing the anti era campaign within 20 states of the union. The church's 1968 liquor by the Drink campaign paled by comparison. And I had voted against that intrusion into the political arena both then and now. Those political campaigns were being directed by Apostle Gordon B. Hinckley.

John Dehlin [01:24:46] Okay, so gotta pause there. First of all, one of the coolest books published by Signature Books is Martha Sontag Bradley's Pedestals, Podiums and Podiums about the era. I still want to have her on Mormon stories if she would ever tell that story.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:25:01] Absolutely. She said she'd come.

John Dehlin [01:25:02] Okay. Okay, so we need to make that happen. But Barbara, do you want to talk anything about like, Gordon B. Hinckley being behind, like the mastermind behind the anti ERA campaign?

Quinn's Feminism and Opposition to the ERA

Barbara Jones Brown [01:25:12] Yes. I did not know that. I mean, I knew that the Church had been against the ERA and their. Everything that it did to just quash that. That something that was about to pass. And I'd always been, you know, Gordon B. Hinckley was my favorite prophet. I loved him, love him, but deadly. Anyways, but so when I read this, I was deeply disappointed to find out that Elder Hinckley at the time was. Was involved in this. It's very unfortunate. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:42] Yo, keep going.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:25:43] Well, one thing that's interesting is that Utah Senator Mike Lee's father, Rex E. Lee, he wrote the kind of the. Is it amicus brief you would say. But anyways, he wrote the background white paper policy for church leaders that they took and used and said, okay, we're going to go against the era. So that was very disappointing. That was very disappointing to learn as well.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:26:10] That was one of our comments that I heard over and over. For those of us reading this book of a certain age, we're like, now we understand what happened to us. You know, we didn't know everything behind the scenes. We knew we were supposed to be against Dra. We knew those things. We didn't understand the politics behind it and the maneuvering and the manipulating. And it is, it's disappointing to find out, you know, things that were part of your life. This was what was going on behind the scenes. And Michael Quinn was there. He knew everything that was happening. And that's why this memoir, like you said, gut wrenching, hard to read, but it's good to understand and to know what happened to you and why you are where you are today.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:26:49] Moshe, you talked about being a 12 year old boy. I was a 12 year old girl when the era was defeated. Living in Denver, Colorado, and people were challenging me. My teachers would say, why does your church, why is your church against equal pay for women? And I just remember going, I don't know, I just. Like you said, I was supposed to be against the ERA and so told Johnson, you know, was being on Donahue. And yeah, this was an era.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:27:16] I remember a woman bearing her testimony and I was a little older than you, but still about that same age and being taken off the stand because she was talking about how we need to support and we need to think about women and their role. She was forcibly removed back in the 70s in my ward. So yeah, it was very dramatic. Sonya Johnson, it was not Sonia Johnson, but it was another woman that dared to stand up and try to say something and was removed from the stand.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:27:40] It's really unfortunate. And one thing that comes out in here that I didn't realize before too was a lot of it was because of homophobia. And one of the things it said is if the ERA passes, then same sex marriage will pass, will become legal.

John Dehlin [01:27:54] And also like the wrong people use the wrong bathrooms.

Moshe Quinn [01:27:56] Right.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:27:57] And it was all about bathrooms. And so I was stunned to find out that the anti queer feelings were a big part of wanting to kill the ERA that I was not aware of.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:28:09] And it was all protecting the nuclear family. That idea, you know, that that had

John Dehlin [01:28:13] to be the most important traditional gender roles.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:28:14] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:28:16] So that's why this next part is fascinating because do we know if D. Michael Quinn identified self identified as a feminist by the mid-70s?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:28:24] Big time?

Moshe Quinn [01:28:25] Well, by that time I don't know. But in my life for sure, it was always like something that I would hear, you know, in the household.

John Dehlin [01:28:30] And Barbara, you'd say mid-70s.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:28:31] Yeah, throughout the book he's talking about being a feminist. But sometimes, you know, he definitely identifies as a feminist. But sometimes you're like, but what he just, what you just wrote there, Mike, that was not feminism. You know, he's like, oh, well, we gave our children, you know, Jan's middle name because that was so forward thinking. And then he admits later, he says, and then I had a friend named Mark Ashurst McGee who took his wife's name and hyphenated it. He said, oh, that's true feminism.

John Dehlin [01:29:01] So yeah, yeah, well, that's why I was going to have you read the next actually, Moshe, I'll have you read it. The paragraph starting on. Well, basically this I don't know. I read this as his his motivated reasoning for why he had to oppose the ERA as a feminist. But this is my perspective is this is his rationale for why he opposed it.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:29:28] And this is where a little bit of that sexism does come out that I was talking about.

Moshe Quinn [01:29:32] Yeah, interesting.

John Dehlin [01:29:32] Okay, so start with nonetheless and just read maybe to the bottom of that page, Moshe, if you don't mind.

Moshe Quinn [01:29:37] Nonetheless, I kept my misgivings and dissent to myself. First, I felt ambivalent because I acknowledged that a person could legitimately argue against such an amendment on rational grounds and that the LDS Church had the legal right to oppose it for whatever reason. For example, I oppose the ERA because it would end the gender discrimination that benefited women in the workplace. In the late 1950s, my factory worker mother commented that she had persuaded her bosses to give women more frequent bathroom breaks than men without requiring women to explain why they needed to take an extra break. For example, a woman might suddenly begin menstruating just minutes after returning from a lunch break or scheduled coffee break.

Moshe Quinn [01:30:20] The Equal Rights Amendment would end such special privileges for women who certainly needed them. As I told Maureen on April 26, I feel that the design of the amendment can be achieved by legislation on specific issues and thus be amenable to gradualism and possible exceptions that would be in favor of women's status and rights to a greater extent than if all sexist bias were constitutionally removed. Second, and most important, because the First Presidency was linking the Equal Rights Amendment to homosexuality, I could not, as a closeted gay at byu, risk guilt by association suspicions if I criticize the Church's activity activism against era. So I remained silent about it, even cautious in responding to friends who asked my views.

John Dehlin [01:31:11] Now, Barbara and Rebecca, I saw some heads nodding and some eye rolling. Yeah. Any response to my Was that motivated reasoning?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:31:20] Well, I'm rolling my eye because what he's saying right there is exactly what the Church was saying. Like, oh, well, if we pass the era, then and mothers will be drafted and sent into war and they'll leave their children behind. The US government isn't going to draft mothers of young children. And what. And then they're going to take care of the kids. I mean just some of those things that were listed as concerns that could happen if the ERA passed were just not legitimate. But Mike was toeing that line here. Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:31:48] And I think like he said in exactly what you read at the end, having to sort of protect it himself because if he were to come out, maybe he, you know, feeling that way, it would be a red flag to people. I think they might, they might think things that he didn't want them to think.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:32:03] He was always being very secretive, very careful, very protective of his homosexuality. His closeted homosexuality. Yeah, that identity.

John Dehlin [01:32:12] So I thought that was fun. Yeah. A couple, I'm just going to say a couple more. I'm just going to throw out a few more tidings that's just as teasers because I want everyone to buy and read this book and I want to just convince you to. So here's some other cool things before we do a little bit of a wrap up. Few more brilliant things and I. Today's episode just comes from like 20 pages of how many pages total?

Post-1890 Polygyny Research and Its Consequences

Barbara Jones Brown [01:32:36] Like 540 pages. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:32:39] Yeah. So we're only taking 20 pages.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:32:42] Skimming the surface of cool stuff. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:32:44] But he talks about, about his concern for polygamous Nigerians being forced to get rid of their plural wives before they

Barbara Jones Brown [01:32:54] can join the church.

John Dehlin [01:32:55] Before they can join the church. And how that didn't necessarily represent the family values that he associates with the church. He talks about his research into post manifesto polygamy. He talks about how the original Mormon temple ceremony lasted like nine hours, which I forgot, some reason didn't know. He talked about the earlier temple recommend questions not mentioning a belief in God, not asking people if they believed in God, which he raised the concern that meant that an atheist could get a temple recommend and he seemed maybe concerned about that. I don't know.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:33:29] And then to throw in another teaser, he also talks about for a limited period and I think it was under Spencer W. Kimball, there was a question if everybody participated if anyone ever had had oral sex, even if they're married. And he talks about his 82 year old grandmother being asked that question and she's appalled. So yeah, another interesting story.

John Dehlin [01:33:52] There's the story of him applying to be a professor or interviewing to be a professor at byu. I think he interviews with Dallin H. Oaks, the man who's right now first in line to become prophet.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:04] Well, no, it was Boyd K. Packer.

John Dehlin [01:34:06] Well okay, so I'm. I'm Looking at page 384.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:10] Dallin H. Oaks is the president of BYU at the time. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:34:13] Okay.

Moshe Quinn [01:34:13] Sorry.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:14] Yeah. But the General Authority interview he has is with. Ironically, it's with Boyd K. Packer.

John Dehlin [01:34:18] Okay. Right. Okay. And then he says, dallas Hooks said to me, michael, Bob and I have put ourselves on the line to back you so down A Chokes is backing D. Michael Quinn to be a professor at byu.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:33] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:34:34] In effect, we have pulled back our armor and bared our flesh. You or anyone else could easily put a knife into us in this situation. And then the chilling line, if you let us down, Barbara, do you want to finish the line?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:49] I'll never forgive you.

John Dehlin [01:34:51] That's chilly.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:34:52] Terrifying.

John Dehlin [01:34:54] I mean, I'm not trying to overdramatize it.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:55] Maybe he was kidding because.

John Dehlin [01:34:56] Yeah, maybe he was kidding.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:34:57] Mike is later excommunicated.

John Dehlin [01:35:01] And then the irony that Michael admits on the very next page to being involved in over 32 excommunications of other members in various bishoprics and or on Stake High Council. So he himself sat on the end of 32 excommunications.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:35:18] He talks about serving in the British Mission, and he says that he excommunicated far more people than he baptized. But that's the baseball faith crisis for him.

John Dehlin [01:35:28] But I thought that was just undoing the baseball baptism.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:35:31] Yeah, yeah. So back then, it appears that you couldn't just take people's names off the rolls of the church. You had to literally excommunicate them. They couldn't just have their names removed.

John Dehlin [01:35:41] So, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty horrible, you know, and then he kind of knows the writings on the wall. I just thought that was interesting. Moshe, on page 386, you can kind of tell, actually start on. So one more section. Sorry. Go to 385. 9th, 19th of July, 1979. Planning for dialogue. Article on post 1890 polygamy. Like he kind of has a foreshadowing of his own demise as it relates to his relationship with the Church. Moshe, this will be the last thing maybe I have. You read.

Moshe Quinn [01:36:21] Okay. From my journal. Depending upon the nature of the article on post 1890 polygamy that will be published next January in Utah Historical Quarterly by B. Carmen Hardy and Victor W. Jorgensen. I am giving more serious consideration to making my last scholarly article on Mormonism an Overview of post 1890 polygamy. Since it appears that the First Presidency will never allow the crucial documents to be made available for an honest exploration of this matter. I may present what I presently understand for whatever benefit it may have to the church membership and understanding. If I do this, I will send the article to Dialogue for publication. It will probably end my career at BYU as well as pose barriers to me in other areas.

Moshe Quinn [01:37:09] But if the presidency will not allow access to anything better, I may as well do what I can for the benefit of the Saints, who may benefit from such an open examination. Such an article on the significance of the 1890 manifesto would not be a bad last hurrah for me as a Mormon historian. After that, I can foresee nothing of significance or fulfillment. End quote of his journal that he's quoting then. Just a last gloss for this memoir. Nonetheless, hoping against hope, I continued for three years to write the First Presidency with requests to give me access to the documents about plural marriage in its vault.

John Dehlin [01:37:49] Barbara, thoughts on that?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:37:51] It's an important story that needs to be told. Just coincidentally, I don't know how I fell into both of these subjects, but my areas of expertise in Mormon history are the Mountain Meadows Massacre and post manifesto polygamy. So two very challenging, troubling subjects. But Mike Quinn is definitely. He is the forerunner of this. He is the one. In my own work, I cited him quite a bit. I'm so grateful for the research he did and did make available through dialogue. There's still a lot that is not available, but his work in this area, I was telling Moshe I think it's one of the last frontiers in Mormon history that has not been written about thoroughly. That is a challenging aspect of our history. So I'm really excited to work with Moshe to publish what we found of what Mike wrote about it on his laptop.

John Dehlin [01:38:47] So there's so much we won't be able to get to today. But that's good, that's a feature, not a bug. Because we want everyone to buy this book, Chosen Path D Michael Quinn Signature Books Please buy it right now, really quickly. I know we gotta run. Moshe, do you want to talk at all about just his final years? And when I heard he had passed and even the circumstances around how it was found out that he had passed. Like there was a part of me that probably projected into it, just real sadness that he. It almost seemed like he had died alone and without support. But I have no idea whether there's any truth to that at all. So I was just, you know, well,

Quinn's Final Years, Legacy, and Impact

Moshe Quinn [01:39:31] he died with a deep, abiding love and support from his family, we children. I'll just speak for myself. I hear it from my sisters as well. But I felt deep and very present love from him. And I really feel very certain that he felt that mutually from me, reciprocally from me.

Moshe Quinn [01:39:53] So I know that he felt love and support from us, and he was a continuing presence in our lives as we were in his lives, you know, every Christmas and, you know, sometimes in the summertime, depending on travel schedules and stuff. Despite him living in Southern California. I'm in the Bay Area. Everyone else has been in the Salt Lake City area.

Moshe Quinn [01:40:10] There was this ongoing presence. So there was that. But in terms of, like, alone romantically, no, he was not in a relationship. And that was just something that he was used to, in a sense, just given his lifetime of holding himself back and denying himself a romantic connection, as he saw it, that was just sort of like what he had signed up for and what he was just like living out as a decision he'd made earlier in his life. But he had any number of friends and contacts who were in touch with him. So he was regularly communicating and in touch and socializing with his community while they were not necessarily that close to him.

Moshe Quinn [01:40:55] In Rancho Cucamonga, outside of la, where he was living for many years, he was in touch generally with people. So it was a mixed picture, I would say. I would say it was not the opposite of what you're asking about. There was definitely solitude, and there was an aloneness that was there.

Moshe Quinn [01:41:14] He was a lone wolf in a lot of ways in his life. So that was there, and that just continued until his passing. But he also had love, and I know that he felt love and connection in his life as well.

John Dehlin [01:41:28] I love hearing that, because he deserved. We all deserve love, and he deserved love.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:41:33] So Sarah Patterson, the historian who just wrote September 6th in the struggle for the Soul of Mormonism, she wrote an essay about Mike that's in another book titled DNA Perspectives on the Legacy of Historian D. Michael Quinn, that she presented at a conference remembering Michael Quinn a year after he died. And she makes the argument we need to not think of Mike as alone because he wasn't, as Moshe just explained. And it's when we project onto him the church's standards of what it means to, you know, be.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:42:08] Have a family and, you know, the church's standards by that we might see him as being alone. But she talked about how much he was loved and in the relationship with his family and how he was still reaching out to historians and making a difference in that community. So I loved her argument when she said that we need to not see him as alone at the end, because he wasn't.

Moshe Quinn [01:42:30] Yeah, and that reminds me, the last thing that I could share on that point is he was up in the Bay Area. Maybe it was in 2017, because there was somebody living in Walnut Creek, east of Berkeley, a little bit, who was inviting him to his home for a gathering of Mormons or people in the community who wanted to hear my father speak. And they were really fascinated by what he would have to say and share. And so I went to that. And it was one of those few kind of like, house gatherings that I know that my father attended a lot of those, many of them over the years because of his community of support.

Moshe Quinn [01:43:09] So I went to one of them in this home, and it was the one that I went to as an adult in Sheridan. And it was this large house, big, like, open floor plan kind of house, and it was just packed. Like, my partner and I at the time, we. We were sitting at the back by the entrance, because there was just no room, really very little room for us to be any closer.

Moshe Quinn [01:43:32] And so I saw and I shared in this community of admiration for my father. And seeing my father speak, he's such a good speaker and so personable and so affable and so in his elements, he sort of just flows in a way that just really loves to see in this kind of context. And so I witnessed that and I shared in that. And that was, you know, five years or so, four years before his passing. And that was just something that was, you know, a through line or a continuing, you know, element, you know, of his life. So he was alone in many ways, and at the same time, he wasn't.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:13] And his legacy. His legacy is with us and will always be with us through as many books he wrote and now through this memoir as well. So D. Michael Quinn will always be remembered.

John Dehlin [01:44:26] Oh, yeah. Yeah. His legacy will live on. Well, buy this book right now. Go to Amazon or go to Signature Books or go to Benchmark Books. The book is Chosen Path Pioneer Book,

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:37] and Provo has it as well.

John Dehlin [01:44:39] Yeah, yeah. Chosen Path and memoir. D Michael Quinn. Barbara, thanks for all you're doing to make good things happen.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:46] Thank you, John. And can I also mention that if this airs beyond before February 8th, we will be having another event at Signature Books. We will have all of the annotators of the book, Conal o', Donovan, Calvin Burke and Sue Bergen, as well as Moshe's sisters, Mary and Lisa, will be there talking again. If you want to come in person, get a book signed and talk to people who are engaged with it.

John Dehlin [01:45:08] Beautiful.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:45:09] Please join us.

John Dehlin [01:45:09] Thanks. Barbara. Moshe it's been a delight to get to know you a little bit. Thanks for coming on Mormon Stories.

Moshe Quinn [01:45:15] Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

John Dehlin [01:45:17] And thanks for sharing amazing insight and wisdom and perspective. And, Rebecca, you always are such an amazing companion to be doing this work with. Any final words?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:45:27] I just have to say that what you're doing is very important, John, in hosting a book club, having the Mormon Stories Book Club, it's so important. Books like this, and we read these every couple months or so, and it's just a whole new world and learning and understanding and deconstructing and it's really important reading. So we appreciate you hosting the book club and everything that you bring to it.

John Dehlin [01:45:48] And the next book is.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:45:50] The next book is uncultured. Everybody go grab this by Daniela Mestjanik Young. Everybody get it.

John Dehlin [01:45:58] All right. Thanks, everyone. It's been great.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:46:01] Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:46:04] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:46:04] Support Mormon historians. Support. Support Mormon scholarship everywhere. Thanks for your support of Mormon Stories. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.