By Megan Christopher, English major
Kerry Pray, Ph.D., was a part of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints or LDS before she was excommunicated for being queer. In her personal essay, “On Cleaving”, Dr. Pray discusses her journey with her ex-husband, wife, and two children. This essay shows what is in The Book of Queer Mormon Joy. It is a collection of stories and personal essays by queer Mormons that Dr. Pray has edited. It was published by Signature Books on May 13. Here is what Dr. Pray had to say about the book:
Q: What was your inspiration for the book?
A: The first book I published, I Spoke to You with Silence, which I co-edited with filmmaker Jenn Lee Smith, was the first collection of its kind. When I decided to leave the church and come out, I literally only knew one lesbian in the entire world who I felt like I could reach out to, and she wasn’t Mormon. I had been scouring libraries for resources or connections and coming up empty handed. Everything I did find was geared toward gay men. (A lot of Mormonism is geared toward men.) So, I reached out to the one lesbian I knew, and she directed me to an organization called Affirmation, which was a support group for queer Mormons. That’s where I met Jenn Lee Smith and we decided that if there were no resources for queer Mormon women, we needed to make some. But the problem we ran into when we put the stories together was that they were heavy. They were the stories of people who were trying to live their lives according to rules that were not made for them, and it was sad and brutal and some of them literally did not survive it. We dedicated the book to a friend of ours who died by suicide and did not think we had the heart to do another book.
So, when a publisher called me and asked if I’d be willing to do another book, I was very hesitant! Jenn said she simply couldn’t. And I thought for a long time about whether I could go through what I’d gone through with the first book. I decided I could not. But what I could do was to collect a different sort of story: what your life could be like when you stopped living according to rules that were never meant for you. A book about joy. That’s how The Book of Queer Mormon Joy came to be.
Q: How did you collect the stories?
A: I put out a call online and through the blog we developed as we were collecting stories for our first book. I emailed all the writers I knew–including one of my exes, because she may be an ex, but she can write! I boosted the call using social media and queer Mormon organizations. It took a little over a year to get enough for the collection.
Q: How large is the queer Mormon community?
A: Larger than people think! A lot of it is quiet, but social media has helped us all connect with each other. The world has changed a lot in the years since I’ve come out and it’s lovely to have been a part of helping that along.
Q: How does being queer affect how the LDS views a person?
A: You cannot be an active, practicing LDS member in good standing if you are in a same-sex marriage, so for me accepting my queerness meant leaving the church behind. It’s the same for a lot of other queer people. I hope that someday this changes.
Q: What impact does this book have on your life?
A: I don’t ever want anyone to be in the place that I was–where they couldn’t find a single book or a single story about a queer person like them. I feel a great sense of peace knowing that because I published these books, they don’t have to be.
Dr. Pray’s book is available on Amazon, Signature Books, and Audible for purchase as well as reading and listening pleasure.