Timeline of LGBTQ Mormon history in the 1960s
history of LGBT people and Mormonism in the 1960s
This is a timeline of LGBT Mormon history in the 1960s, part of a series of timelines consisting of events, publications, and speeches about LGBTQ+ individuals, topics around sexual orientation and gender minorities, and the community of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Although the historical record is often scarce, evidence points to queer individuals having existed in the Mormon community since its beginnings. However, top LDS leaders only started regularly addressing queer topics in public in the late 1950s. Since 1970, the LDS Church has had at least one official publication or speech from a high-ranking leader referencing LGBT topics every year, and a greater number of LGBT Mormon and former Mormon individuals have received media coverage.
Timeline
1960
March – An editorial in the church newspaper by Mark Petersen blamed pornography (including "pin-up-boy" magazines for homosexuals and pocket-sized books featuring "lesbianism, homosexuality") for a national increase in crime, and called for legislation to censor such smut.
September – Utah native and LDS-raised R. Joel Dorius (born 1919) would become an unwitting champion of gay liberation after he was arrested in Massachusetts along with two coworkers and fired from his language and visual arts Smith College professorship. His house was raided and beefcake fitness magazines with erotic images of men were found in what is now considered a McCarthyist gay witch hunt. Along with a coworker, Dorius appealed the verdict of pornography possession to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and all three professors were exonerated as the raid warrants were deemed unconstitutional. The scandal has been dramatized in The Scarlet Professor and the PBS documentary The Great Pink Scare.
October – The church newspaper printed an article on homosexuality based on a speech from a Salt Lake City psychiatrist.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Timeline of LGBTQ Mormon history in the 1960s” as history of LGBT people and Mormonism in the 1960s. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as history of LGBT people and Mormonism in the 1960s. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q111954939. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1960 and 1919.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Timeline of LGBTQ Mormon history in the 1960s” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.