Eric James Stone provides author’s notes for his provocative short-short story, which was recently published in the Arch-Hive.
Spoilers ahead, so please go read the story if you haven’t already.
I grew up in a fairly traditional Latter-day Saint family and considered myself pretty orthodox in my religious beliefs (for LDS values of “orthodox”) for most of my life. With the advent of blogging and social media in the early 2000s, I engaged in online debates over same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights as a staunch defender of the Church’s position as outlined in The Family: A Proclamation to the World.
In 2011, after I won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for my novelette “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” I was subjected to intense online criticism for my views. During that time, if you tried to Google my name, “eric james stone homophobia” was the first suggested search term.
I did not moderate or change my views as a result of that. If anything, I felt a sense of righteousness for standing up for my beliefs in the face of opposition.
In 2013, prolific and award-winning author Jay Lake announced he had received a terminal cancer diagnosis. Jay and I had become friends through the speculative fiction writing community. He was an atheist on the left side of the political spectrum, while I was a believer on the right, but we engaged in discussions about our beliefs in a thoughtful and respectful (and occasionally snarky) manner.
Knowing that Jay was going to die, I thought about what would happen when he ended up in the Spirit World and realized he had been wrong about the existence God and the afterlife. Would he accept the gospel?
And I realized he probably wouldn’t.
Jay was not gay, but he was a staunch defender of gay rights. I realized that he would not accept the gospel in the next life because he would not think a God who told His Church to treat gay people the way our Church treats gay people to be a God worthy of worship. That got me to do some real soul-searching, which I detailed in a (very long) 2014 blog post in which I supported the legalization of same-sex marriage and expressed my hope that the Church would eventually recognize such marriages.
Since posting that, I have become even more supportive of the rights of homosexual and transgender people. I loved Blair Ostler’s book Queer Mormon Theology, which helped me resolve my remaining concerns about how homosexuality and transgenderism could be reconciled with our theology.
During the same period, I also became more troubled by the roles of men and women in the Church. I kept thinking about 2 Nephi 26:33: “…he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”
All are alike unto God. It’s very hard to reconcile that scripture with the ban on blacks being ordained to the priesthood, which the Gospel Topics essay on Race and the Priesthood essentially admits was due to the prejudices of men at the time. But it’s also very hard to reconcile that scripture with the ban on women being ordained to the priesthood. Might that ban also be due to the prejudices of men?
So, having gotten to the point where I was hoping that someday a prophet of the Church would receive revelation to change some of these things, I started thinking about how that revelation might come. And I decided to write a speculative theology short story.
I thought of Acts 10, in which Peter has a vision in which he is told to eat animals that were considered common or unclean under Jewish law, and when he refuses, the Lord tells him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.” This happened three times before the vision ended. The interpretation of the dream was that it was time to extend the gospel to the Gentiles.
I also thought of Joseph Smith’s vision of the Angel Moroni, in which the message was delivered three times during the night.
Those gave me the idea of a thrice-repeated vision as a format for revelation. But having the exact same thing three times in a row would be boring, so I decided use the same basic scenario but alter it to address three different points.
Finding the quote from President Oaks about conditions in the spirit world was just icing on the cake.
This story is an exercise in empathy: how would you feel if the tables were turned? I think that sort of empathy is an important part of loving your neighbor. I don’t expect that my story will get anyone to change their position on same-sex marriage, transgender issues, or the ordination of women. But my hope in writing this story was to maybe get some people to think more deeply about some of the default assumptions we tend to have as orthodox members of the Church, assumptions I was comfortable with for most of my life.
Eric James Stone is a Nebula Award winner, Writers of the Future Contest winner, and two-time finalist for the Association for Mormon Letters Awards. Over sixty of his stories have been published in venues such as Year’s Best SF, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Nature. His debut novel, the science fiction thriller Unforgettable, has been optioned by Hollywood multiple times. Eric lives in Utah with his wife, Darci, who is an award-winning author herself, in addition to being a high school science teacher and programmer. They have two children.