Linda & Steve Stay
Parents and Activists
Linda and Steve Stay have been accused more than once of being “utopian hippies”. Just over 8 years ago, with 89 years of combined active LDS church membership, they sat at Temple Square considering the possibility of blending a family of nine children. One of the first conversations they had was Linda sharing, “I have a gay son and I’m okay with it, which freaks a lot of people out”. Steve said he was cool with it if she was, and six weeks later they tied the knot.
A short time later they discovered they were blessed with a second gay child. Little did they realize just how “freaked out” friends and family would be as the years past and Linda and Steve found themselves front and center in the movement for equality and respect within their own church and families.
Being 5th generation Mormons with Linda being a descendant of Fredrick G Williams, counselor to Joseph Smith, she would say the LDS faith is in her DNA. Similar to his polygamous grandfather 4 generations earlier, Linda’s son Tyler chose a non-traditional marriage with his returned missionary partner, Spencer Jones in San Francisco in June of 2008.
As the Mormon Church became aggressively involved in Proposition 8, there was no other choice for Linda and Steve but to stand up, “come out” and be heard. As a result they have been featured in local and national news numerous times and have experienced the pain and challenge of keeping open dialogue with siblings, children and parents who are divided on this issue because of the church’s stance on it. They are committed to “drawing the larger circle” around those that feel a need to shut them out, heal the hurt through love and grow through the experience. Their family will be the focal point in Reed Cowan’s documentary film “8: The Mormon Proposition.”
Created by the Stay’s covering Tyler’s June wedding day at San Francisco City Hall
Candle Light Vigil held in St George, UT:
Linda and Steve make their living as marketing consultants, personal performance coaches and are the self published authors of Accept Abundance, The Acceptance Book and The Namastay Experiment. You can read more at: www.AcceptAbundance.com
"Borderlands"
Book by Eric Samuelsen, Directed by Jerry Rapier.
FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT
In Mormon culture, we feel tremendous social pressure to conform. We all want to appear as though everything's just fine, all the time. Our kids are all active in the Church, moving without difficulty down the Eagle Scout/Young Women's Medallion/mission/temple marriage path. Our own marriages are happy and mutually sustaining, we have callings in the Church that we fulfill without crisis or incident. Everything's fine. And it's embarrassing when we have to admit that something isn't fine.
But those conversations are the really interesting ones, the ones we have with friends in the Church or with family members when everything isn't fine. The ones we avoid as long as we can. My oldest son didn't go on a mission, and although we knew he wasn't going to go, it took my wife and I a long time to admit it to anyone. We'd stall; we'd make excuses. "He's still saving up money," we'd say. Our second child, our oldest daughter, married someone who wasn't Mormon. Again, it was embarrassing, and we had to steel ourselves to tell family members. My wife has a sister whose family is perfect, and we worried about how to tell her about our daughter. We went to see her, and she greeted us with a bombshell. Her oldest son had come out. He was gay. A much bigger crisis for active Mormons.
Eric Samuelsen
So I wrote a play about coming out. Not just coming out in the usual sense--in fact, in "BORDERLANDS", the one gay character is already out. It's a play about all the other ways we come out as Mormons, about admitting that we don't necessarily believe what we're supposed to believe, or that we don't always find it possible to live the way we're expected to live. It's a play about moments of unanticipated honesty, and the revelations that result. And it's a play about the hard work of carving out a social space for those for whom none exists in Mormon culture.
So the characters in this play sit in an honesty car, and tell the truth about what liars they are. Because they're Mormons, they're much harsher in their self-judgments than they really need to be. And that pressure to conform blinds them to people who really are genuinely suffering. Finally, one young man finds a way to actually be what the other characters profess to be. A Christian, in the profoundest sense of the word. That he's also the one gay character is not, I promise, accidental.
The cast is Kirt Bateman (Plan-B's EXPOSED, GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! and DI ESPERIENZA); Teri Cowan (Plan-B's AMERIKA, THE ALIENATION EFFEKT and EXPOSED); April Fossen (Plan-B's MIASMA); and newcomer Topher Rasmussen.
Playwright Eric Samuelsen is the head of the playwrighting program at BYU. His many credits include MIASMA, commissioned by Plan-B, and the film PECULIARITIES.
Carl Sciortino
Massachusetts State Representative | 34th Middlesex District
Massachusetts Representative Carl Sciortino will be addressing the 2009 Affirmation Conference, as well as conducting a small group session. Carl is one of the significant members of the rising generation of gay political leaders in the United States.
Carl Sciortino is a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, representing Somerville and Medford in the Boston metropolitan area. After defeating an anti-marriage incumbent in 2004 at 26 years old, he is now one of the few out GLBT members of the legislature. Carl took a leadership role in defeating the anti-marriage constitutional amendment, and has filed transgender civil rights legislation for the first time in Massachusetts’ history.
Carl Sciortino celebrates his 2004 primary victory against an ardent foe of same-sex marriage
Rep. Sciortino is deeply committed to working for the families in his community, and has been a tireless advocate for issues of social and economic justice. He passed amendments to the state budget which resulted in increased funding for the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program (MRVP) and Hepatitis-C prevention and treatment programs. Rep. Sciortino also helped pass and override the governor's veto on legislation which resulted in an increase to the minimum wage to $8.00/hour, the highest in the nation. He supported an amendment to the state's constitution which would make health care for all a constitutionally guaranteed right and he helped pass a landmark bill that makes affordable, quality insurance accessible to 95% to the state's 500,000 uninsured residents.
Carl is the Vice Chairman of the Joint Committee on Transportation, and serves on the House Committee on Way & Means and the Joint Committee on Health Care Finance. He has taken leadership roles in raising the minimum wage, improving finances for public transportation, passing Massachusetts’ landmark universal healthcare law, and pushing for improvements in education & testing policies.
Carl and Peter Ungar of the Foss Park Neighborhood Association discuss the condition of the park.
Prior to the legislature, Carl worked in the public health field, working on HIV/AIDS clinical research. He graduated with a degree in Biology from Tufts University and is Vice Chair of the Medford Democratic City Committee and a member of the Progressive Democrats of Somerville, along with many other local community organizations.
Music and the Spoken Word
From within the shadow of the everlasting hills
For many, no visit to Salt Lake City would be complete without attending a Sunday morning live broadcast from Temple Square of “Music and the Spoken Word,” featuring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The TRAX light rail system will take you from the University Guest House to Temple Square, and then just a very short walk to the Conference Center. The doors open at 8:30 am and you must be seated by 9:15 when the doors are closed. The broadcast is begins at 9:30. Please note that children under the age of eight will not be admitted.
The first broadcast of Music and the Spoken Word was on July 15, 1929. The heat was sweltering, and there was only one microphone, which was suspended from the ceiling of the Tabernacle on Temple Square. The announcer had to climb to the top of a ladder to get to the microphone, and then stayed there for the entire thirty-minute broadcast. The audio engineer was alerted by telegraph when to start the broadcast, and he gave a hand cue to the announcer on the ladder, who began, “From the crossroads of the West, we welcome you to a program of inspirational music and spoken word." The same words have opened the broadcast each week for nearly eighty years.
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir 1929
Music and the Spoken Word has become the world's longest-running continuous network broadcast and is carried on more than 2,000 radio and television stations and cable systems. It has been broadcast from locations across the country and around the world, although most of the broadcasts have originated from the 8,000-seat Salt Lake Tabernacle. The Tabernacle is a dome-shaped building, constructed 1864 to 1867 on the west center-line axis of the Salt Lake Temple. To accommodate renovations made to the Tabernacle, the broadcast was moved to the Conference Center in 2005. Located across the street from the Tabernacle, the Conference Center seats 21,333, and is believed to be the largest theater-style auditorium ever built.
The center-point of each broadcast is the GrammyAward-winning Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The 360-voice choir was founded in 1847, one month after the Mormon Pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley. The choir will often be joined by special guests, including popular or well-known mucisians, singers, or actors, or by the 110-member Orchestra at Temple Square, which was created in 1999 in order to increase the aesthetic and musical quality of the choir’s performances.
Since its inception in 1929, the "spoken word" segment of the program has been voiced by three separate individuals. The original writer, producer, and announcer of the spoken portion of the broadcast was Richard L. Evans, who continued in that capacity until his death in 1971. J. Spencer Kinard took over as announcer in 1972 until he stepped down in 1990. Lloyd D. Newell has been the announcer since then. The broadcast opens with the words, "From the crossroads of the West, we welcome you to a program of inspirational music and spoken word." The announcer then introduces the songs by reciting short scripture quotes and literature before each song, with a longer spoken message near the end of the program. Music and the Spoken Word closes with the words: "Again we leave you from within the shadow of the everlasting hills. May peace be with you, this day and always," followed by the choir singing the traditional LDS hymn "God Be With You Till We Meet Again".
