Seth Anderson discusses the history of Utah's LGBTQ+ (Season 1, Ep. 15 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, senior public historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah, accessible to the widest audience.
Speak Your Piece is a podcast where writers, historians, curators, and all those who contribute to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries.
If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place.
My guest today is J. Seth Anderson, author of LGBTQ Salt Lake, an Arcadia publication, part of their Image of Modern American series, which is published in 2017

**Seth Anderson** (0:59)
That's right.

**Brad Westwood** (1:00)
Welcome, friend.

**Seth Anderson** (1:01)
Thank you. Good to see you again.

**Brad Westwood** (1:03)
Seth Anderson was born and raised in Utah, as well as in Arizona. He has a PhD candidate in American history at Boston University. His research interests include the history of culture, religion, medicine, and sexuality from the late 19th century through the 20th century. His dissertation focuses on the history of conversion therapy in the United States, and we're going to be talking about just what that means. He earned his master's degree at the University of Utah, where he studied the history and the effects of HIV, AIDS in Utah. He's published two books and has written, his writings have appeared in the Washington Post and the New England Journal of Medicine, and we'll include those in our links and our show notes. But if you want to get there quickly, it's heritageandartsoneword.utah.gov, and then Speak Your Piece. You can also search by just looking up Brad Westwood and Speak Your Piece and it will come up.
Seth and his husband, Dr. Michael Ferguson, were the first same-sex couple married in Utah, and we'll be asking Seth to recap that story.
They currently live in Boston. Seth, again, so glad to have you here.

**Seth Anderson** (2:18)
Thank you very much. It's good to be home.

**Brad Westwood** (2:23)
Tell me about the book, LGBTQ Salt Lake.

**Seth Anderson** (2:31)
It was a book I actually wanted to write it many years ago, probably 10 years ago. I had written a book for Arcadia called Downtown Phoenix. It was a history of the city of neighborhoods and buildings. Shortly after I finished that, I emailed the publisher and said, Hey, I have this idea that I want to do a book about gay Salt Lake. At the time, they were like, That's interesting. Because they're images books, right? They're not historical monographs.
They are limited in the scope by what you can write about, by the images that you have. So if you don't have enough images, you can't do the book.

**Brad Westwood** (3:01)
So it's a series, it's a continuous series of images with a certain amount of caption.

**Seth Anderson** (3:07)
Yes.

**Brad Westwood** (3:07)
But it gives a general historical flavor for whatever the subject is.

**Seth Anderson** (3:11)
They focus on local histories, that's why I liked them. I had the experience with the first book and so I wanted to do this one about Salt Lake. I was very particular and I didn't just want to do a photo splash, just pull a bunch of images and be like, Here's a picture of this person and here's a picture of a parade. I really wanted to dig deep into the history of it.
That was a challenge because not only are you limited by the images, but you're limited by word counts for that series of book. So you have to condense a ton of information into really tight sentences.

**Brad Westwood** (3:41)
Fairly pithy.

**Seth Anderson** (3:42)
Yes, but also not be boring. It was a really fun challenge because I knew so much of that history already, but there wasn't one place where you could find it.
That was one of the reasons I wanted to put it all together in one place.
It was a joy to work on. It was the publisher said, okay, turn us a draft maybe in a year. I was like, I'll have it in two months. I can write this quickly. I know this history and I have a ton of images. That was fun finding stuff from the archives. That's where I originally met you.

**Brad Westwood** (4:17)
Yeah, at the State Historical Society.

**Seth Anderson** (4:19)
Yep. I spent some time working on there, found some great stuff.
Then it was a community project as well, where I emailed and talked with a bunch of elders of the community in Salt Lake. I was like, hey, do you have a box of photos in your basement that I could look through? Some did. I found awesome, amazing images from the gay community in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, that nobody had ever seen.