For time and eternity: feeling the spirit in the lives of LGBTQ+ Mormons

Abstract

ABSTRACT Queer exclusion from the Mormon Plan of Salvation causes both this worldly and eternal theological concerns for many LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saints. In this essay, we take up questions regarding the embodied nature of personal revelation within Mormonism to understand the ways that LGBTQ+ Mormons in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have resituated and reconfigured authority and divine truth. Drawing on archival records from the Mormon LGBTQ+ organisation, Affirmation, we argue that as LGBTQ+ Mormons searched to find their place in the Plan of Salvation they turned to theologies of the Spirit taught to them by the LDS Church. Our attention to the ways that LGBTQ+ Mormons have struggled to locate truth and (self-) affirmation within their embodied experiences offers further insight into the body as a central site for the production of knowledge and belief. Ultimately, we assert that LGBTQ+ Mormons have utilised these theologies of the Spirit to critique the covenantal hetero-captivity of the Plan of Salvation.