Salt Lake City Pride Parade

Speaking About Utah’s LGBTQ+ History

With the fifty-first anniversary of the NYC Stonewall Riots (June 28th to July 3rd) ending just before the 4th of July weekend, this Speak Your Piece podcast by Senior Public Historian Brad Westwood with historian J. Seth Anderson offers some contemporary Utah history.

Anderson is the author of LGBTQ Salt Lake, published by Arcadia Publishing in 2017. Anderson was raised in Central Utah and in Arizona and is currently a PhD Candidate in American History at Boston University. His research interests include the history of culture, religion, medicine, and sexuality, from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. 

His dissertation focuses on the history of conversion therapy (a pseudoscientific therapy intent on changing sexual orientation) in the United States. He earned his master’s degree at the University of Utah, where he studied the history and the effects of HIV/AIDS in Utah.

Anderson has published two books, and his writings have appeared in the Washington Post and the New England Journal of Medicine. Seth and his husband, Dr. Michael Ferguson, were the first same-sex couple married in Utah. They currently live in Boston.

Watch for the second part of this episode on July 6.

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