Mormon Stories Podcasts make possible through the financial contributions of its listeners.

To keep it alive and available to future generations, please consider a donation today at MormonStories.org.

This interview was also recorded in high-definitioned video and can be viewed at MormonStories.org

on YouTube at youtube.com slash Mormon Stories and in iTunes as part of the podcast feed.

So, two years after Gerald died, goodbye love he was published.

Yes.

What was that like?

Oh, it was a big, it was big.

Gerald and I never discussed the idea that I would write our story, which seems weird now,

but it never crossed our conversation.

And it was a couple of weeks after his passing that I, being inundated with all these awful

stories of young men being totally abandoned by their families and dying alone with

AIDS and knowing that my particular Mormon community was still very ignorant on the subject

of homosexuality.

It occurred to me that maybe I should write something and I wrote a proposal for an

article for Good Housekeeping or Red Book, a Ladies' Home Journal, whatever.

And to shorten all this, because we need to, I was able to get an agent who very quickly

sold the idea of a book to Random House.

And I worked with that editor and I went back through my diaries and was able to find

a lot of very important immediate material.

And I spent about a year writing the book and then they took another year to get it published.

So it came out in 86 and that was a very scary, scary time.

...